Tatung Co Ltd, the Taiwanese manufacturer of home electronic appliances has chosen Lucent Technologies Inferno real-time operating system for its internet television set-top box. The move is yet another blow to Sun Microsystems Inc efforts with its delayed JavaOS operating system, as Tatung was a member of the first tranche of Java licensees announced in May last year (CI No 2,923). Sun claimed it couldn’t tell us whether Tatung was a JavaOS licensee – it gets very defensive about the subject these days as nobody is shipping products in volume using it, including Sun, and Tatung was unavailable in Taiwan for comment. Tatung will use Inferno, the embedded operating system designed by the Bell Labs team that originally came up with Unix, for set-top box, which due out on the market in early 1998. Tatung already has a license for the rival David operating systems from Microware Systems Inc (CI No 3,084), but says it will use the dynamic software capabilities of Inferno in its set-tops in order to keep up with changing device network demands.
