A year after the bundle of graphical operating system software for 80386 and 80486-based personal computers known as Open Desktop was announced by Santa Cruz Operation Inc, DEC, Tandy Corp, Locus Computing Corp and Ingres Corp at UniForum 89, Santa Cruz says that first customer shipments have now begun – Grid Systems Corp and Harris Corp being the first recipients. Open Desktop combines X Window, OSF/Motif, SCO Unix V/386 3.2, the Ingres relational database manager, LAN Manager/X client, TCP/IP, NFS, networking services and MS-DOS emulation within a single user environment. There are currently 17 applications that will run under Open Desktop, 60 others are reckoned to be near completion, and Santa Cruz says that over 1,100 developers have now committed to bring compatible applications to market. Amongst those available are XVT from XVT Software Inc, Century Software’s Term communications package Term, Cloisonne’s database templates, the CAD/CAM Advantage application from Cognition, Crosswind Technologies’ Synchronize, Human Computing Resources’ dbXtra, EIFFEL from ISE, Mark V’s Adagen, PC-Inmail from Transparent Technology, Vi Corp’s Data Views, ClearView and WP/X from Wang and Informix’s Wingz technology. A single user copy of Open Desktop costs UKP900 in the UK now, with Server Upgrades and the Development System costing UKP1,295 each later this quarter. Santa Cruz also says it has begun shipping version 2.0 of its 1-2-3-alike spreadsheet, SCO Professional, and the dBase III-alike SCO FoxBase+, for Sun-3, 386i and Sparc systems. Single user licences for both are $700, multi-user configurations go from $1,300 on the Sun-3 and 386i to $2,500 on Sparc systems. Additionally in the UK, Santa Cruz says Microsoft Word Version 5.0 is available for systems running SCO Unix V/386 and Xenix 386 release 2.3 at a tag of UKP750 for an unlimited user licence – French and German versions will follow in the second quarter. But despite the company’s optimism, observers are wondering whether or not Santa Cruz’s experience in the graphical desktop market, its distribution strategy, and the general readiness of the market to accept Unix as a desktop product in competition to OS/2 and MS-DOS, will provide the sort of volumes needed to make Open Desktop a successful standard.
