Amongst those projects that were absorbed during the merging of Sperry and Burroughs to form Unisys, was Sperry Corp’s expert systems business, which paired Texas Instrument’s Explorer workstation with software from Intellicorp of San Jose, California. That business is now being rekindled, with Unisys adding the Texas Instruments Explorer II workstation and a range of software to its Knowledge Systems product line. Unisys is the sole supplier of Texas Instruments machines running Intellicorp’s KEE Knowledge Engineering Environment toolkit, which now incorporates the PC-Host delivery system, enabling applications created using the Environment on Lisp machines to be transferred from the single-user Explorer to a Unisys 5000/50 Unix micro with attached personal computers: the advantages are low-cost access and integration with traditional information processing. Unisys Knowledge Systems has also announced its own KS/Answer, for prototyping IBM database-dependent expert systems in conjunction with Sterling Software’s Answer/DB, and is looking forward to the launch fairly soon of a new version of the KES/11 expert system shell, which was developed by Software Architecture & Engineering Ltd here in the UK, down in Chichester, West Sussex.
