Future releases of Unix from the Santa Cruz Operation will benefit from a new licensing agreement with Acer Counterpoint Inc, which will allow Santa Cruz to include Acer’s Fast File System within its System V/386 version of Unix. According to Acer Counterpoint, the file system has been benchmarked as the industry’s highest performance Unix file system, and uses a proprietary bit map technique for contiguously allocating space on the disk, which allows more information to be transferred each time the disk is accessed than with conventional Unix file systems. Developed by Unix software engineers at Counterpoint Computers Inc, which became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Tiawanese AcerMultitech group back in November 1987, the Fast File System should be incorporated into the next release of System V/386. Acer Counterpoint and Santa Cruz formed a strategic development partnership late last summer, which so far has resulted in Acer’s support of the Santa Cruz firm’s Open Desktop package. The two companies promise the announcements are the first of a series of steps growing out of that partnership.
