Tandem Computers Inc may not be the first commercial manufacturer out with a Chorus Systemes SA microkernel -based system (CI No 2,037), although it may yet find itself in a race to be first to deliver in volume: for the last two or three years, Chorus has been involved with Unisys Corp in a technology exchange that has so far failed to produce any significant deliveries, although Unisys is expected to make its move in the coming months; these relationships have enabled Chorus to piggyback on the expertise of its partners, netting Chorus a System V.4 base in the case of Unisys and now fault-tolerance from Tandem; a third alliance with a still unidentified company next month should give it a leg up on high-performance transaction processing and multi-processing.