With X/Open Group Ltd and Japan’s all-powerful Ministry of International Trade & Industry making eyes at one another, Japan Inc is now totally committed to Unix, although rather than try to persuade the US industry to abandon its childish and damaging divergence into two suspicious camps, individual companies are weighing the balance of unconnected alliances and short-term convenience and lining up either behind the true-to-Unix Unix International Inc or the renegade Open Software Foundation. But to the extent that Unix of whatever parentage equates to standards, Japanese companies are racing to adopt the standards and rush products to market. And the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s X Window System Unix windowing technology is high on the list of standards that are generating products in Japan – so much so that the brave little US companies that set the X Terminal market rolling, Network Computing Devices Inc and Visual Technology Inc are in grave danger of getting trampled in the rush. Takaoka Electric Co, Nippon Computer Corp and Omron Tateishi Electronic Corp have teamed up to develop low-priced terminals that run the X Window System, each company contributing a different member to the family. The displays meet the requirement of an X terminal that it supports multiple programs running at the same time on the screen and that with an engineering workstation as the host, each terminal can access different data from the host and process it concurrently. According to Newsbytes Japan, the terminals should reach the market in October under the name User Interface Workstation or UIW. The terminals are built around the high end Motorola 68030 processor and include Ethernet interface. The terminal from Takaoka have a 15 black-and-white display and will be priced at or $2,500 – low-cost is a relative term when it comes to Japan. Nippon Computer is planning to offer its terminal with a 17 colour display and will be selling it for $4,100. And Omron Tateishi Electronics, still best known for its point-of-sale terminals, will offer a version with a 17 plasma display at $4,150 – but that one won’t be available until April next year. The three companies are hoping to get 5,000 of the things away in the first year under their own names in the first year of marketing, and look for additional business by offering them OEM.
