Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based Transarc Corp, one of the original members of DECorum, last week started taking orders for the first Distributed Computing Environment developers kit, which it’s making available on Sun Microsystems Inc and IBM Corp workstations starting in March. Based on DCE 1.0, it’s intended for SunOS 4.1.2, also known as Solaris 1.0, and AIX 3.2. The kit includes the core Distributed Environment components: Remote Procedure Call, Threads, Cell Director Service and Security Services. Distributed File Service and the Global Director Service among other less essential pieces are not included. The kit will come as a bundled package priced at $15,000. Licensees may operate one Name Server, one Security Server and up to 10 Distributed Computing Environments clients. Support and training are included as is an upgrade based on DCE 1.0.1. Transarc proposes to provide two places on a two-day course for application developers. Additional server licences will go for $2,000 each and client licences for $500 each. Additional training can be had for $750 a seat. Early licensees are expected to include companies developing applications using Encina, Transarc’s DCE-based transaction processing products. First product ships of Encina are scheduled for this quarter. The company is particularly anxious, especially since it gets royalties from its DCE contributions, to get applications implemented. It seems its customers identified Sun and IBM boxes as the most important systems to them.
