Mac-on-Unix house Quorum Software Systems Inc, a hit at last year’s UniForum, this week will stage the first public, albeit belated, showing of its Equal end-user product at the Silicon Graphics Inc and Sparc International booths. Equal, originally due in December, is now scheduled to ship in the second quarter. Quorum, which says some of the blame for Equal’s delay has been on the legal hassle it had last year with Apple Computer Inc, which held up financing and staffing, will position the product as a Mac application adaptor rather than an emulator. The Menlo Park, California-based company’s market research has found that users are interested in running Mac programs native under Motif out of performance considerations and have little truck with bulky emulators. Luckily Equal is not an emulator. Quorum also found 80% to 85% of its potential audience are interested simply in running off-the-shelf Mac packages of Word and Excel: this is what Quorum is currently polishing up and will be showing. It says other programs run, but the company will have to ward off criticism that it does not have a significant inventory of tested packages. Quorum will also announce a long-awaited deal with Adobe Systems Inc to license its software developers’ Latitude for converting its Macintosh programs to the Unix system under Display PostScript, Motif or Open Look.
