The Santa Cruz Operation, Santa Cruz, California has been talking about its involvement with Microsoft Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co in the development of the much-vaunted Presentation Manager/X or PM/X, which is intended to offer a common graphical front end to both Unix and OS/2-based systems, and has just been chosen as an element of the Open Software Foundation’s User Environment Component (CI No 1,085). The existing Microsoft Presentation Manager software is to be integrated with Hewlett’s Common X Interface, but must first be translated into C to make it portable. Santa Cruz, which is to undertake the translation, admits that even the final version of PM/X will not give all the functionality of Presentation Manager, but says it is to make additions to X Window Version 11 to ensure it is as complete as possible. The work should be complete by the middle of this year according to Santa Cruz, and an initial version of PM/X, for use by software developers, will be available from all three companies late this year.
