Shares in privately-held company Unisoft Ltd have passed from the original founders to the current managers and staff of the company, headed by chairman Jeremy Thomas, and backed by an unidentified venture capital company. London-based Unisoft Ltd, with Unisoft Corp, its wholly-owned Emeryville, California-based subsidiary, now employs 25 people, down from the 80 or so when Thomas joined as chief executive in 1987. Nippon Unisoft, based in Tokyo, is a distributor. Shares will be available for the employees. The UK’s Root Computers Ltd, headed by David Saunderson, gradually took over the US Unisoft Corp between 1985 and 1987, but Saunderson and Unisoft founder Jeff Schriedman have not been active at the company since 1990. During that time, Unisoft’s prime revenue source, from its Unix technical and conversion expertise for Motorola Inc’s 68000 family of chips, slipped away as the market shifted to RISC. The company’s subsequent RISC initiatives with the Motorola 88000 and the Advanced Computing Environment Consortium also failed to come up trumps. Thomas, with Root’s original technical director Andrew Twigger (now Unisoft chief executive), are planning to build up the testing and verification side of the business: they developed and supply X/Open Co Ltd’s VXS test suite for X/Open Portability Guide conformance, and have produced a System V.4.2 conformance testing suite for Novell Inc’s Unix Systems Group, currently in beta test. Also nearing release is an applications verification suite for binary applications, destined to be part of a Unix Systems Group branding scheme. Complete applications verification is not possible, but the suite will enable independent software vendors to check whether they have used any code that will stop their applications running on other systems. Extensions to include multiprocessing and SPEC 1170 are under development. On the conversion side, Thomas says there is an emerging need for cheap and quick implementations for standard, personal computer-based hardware (both iAPX-86 and RISC), an easier task since hardware dependencies were segregated off from the rest of the code in System V.4.2.
