ModComp, Modular Computer Systems Inc, Fort Lauderdale subsidiary of AEG AG of West Germany, has held out against the irresistable tide flowing for Unix just about the longest of any of the traditional minimakers but the company has now succumbed, bringing out an implementation of Unix System V.2 for its Classic line of minicomputers, and marrying it intimately with its proprietary Max 32 real-time operating system. The company calls the result Realix, and claims that it is the first true breakthrough of Unix operating systems in the real-time world – the claim seemingly tagged to the power of its real-time environment rather than scepticism of others’ claims for real-time extensions to Unix. ModComp is pushing Realix as a means for users to gain the traditional benefits of Unix as a development environment in their implementation of real-time applications. Realix includes the Bourne shell command interpreter and utilities, and an integrated C compiler that generates Modcomp 32-bit assembly language from C source code. Max 32 within Realix offers a real-time, event-driven executive, fast task loading and switching, dynamic allocation of resources, intertask communication and addresses up to 1Gb, and multiprogramming in Fortran, Pascal and Cobol; Unix processes can execute concurrently with Max real-time tasks. Realix needs a Classic 32/85 with 8Mb memory, console, two disks, tape, line printer and one async channel on a communications subsystem. It will be available in the second quarter; price will depend on configuration.
