The US major said to be in league with the little French operating systems house Chorus Systemes SA (CI No 1,503), is expected to turn out to be Unisys Corp, according to today’s issue of our sister paper Unigram.X. Unisys is expected to develop and adopt an advanced version of the Paris-based company’s Chorus/Mix product – and the secret alliance must be a year old: it is understood that work has already begun to move Chorus/Mix from its present Unix System V.3.2 base up to System V.4. Although Unisys itself will probably put in some extensions exclusive to itself, it is believed that Chorus will be able to offer the update to other vendors. The Unisys-Chorus work will probably produce software that is more scalable, standards-conformant and fault-tolerant than at present, making the necessary genuflections bows to loosely coupled architectures, and adding transaction processing features. The most likely Unisys machine for the software will be the forthcoming Motorola 88000 RISC-based range currently under development at the old Convergent base in San Jose, with help from Unisys mainframe engineers from Pasadena. These are expected to feature multi-processing and a mainframe-like architecture. The announcement of the alliance is expected to be made today, as part of the lar ger Unisys announcement of its Unisys Architecture integration package, but is unlike ly to do much to cheer Unisys share holders suddenly deprived of their long-accustomed dividend: details of that shock are in page five today.
