Unix International Inc president Peter Cunningham reports that 205 people representing 150 companies turned up at its members meeting in San Diego last month, but that the really encouraging thing was how many business meetings were set up during and around the sessions. Unix International wheeled in a number of MVS and VMS applications vendors to survey the assembled masses in an attempt to get them interested in the Unix System V.4 marketplace. As talk of Microsoft Corp’s NT technology gathers pace, with the likelihood that it will eventually be scalable to servers and available across multiple systems, Unix International is keen to demonstrate that Destiny – its new desktop technology, demonstrated in private rooms at the meeting – is already offering the sort of functionality that NT might never achieve. Destiny, says Cunningham, is extremely capable technology for those that need to have more than one application running on the desktop. By this he means multi-tasking in X Window without impacting the rest of the system. At the demonstration, a facsimile message was sent from one window while full-motion video ran in another. Cunningham estimates that 10% to 15% of corporate users need this level of multi-tasking. The Unix International Roadmap has been duly published. Cunningham points out that work on establishing standard systems management components is progressing faster than expected. The Tivoli-based object framework level – compatible with the Foundation’s Distributed Management Environment effort – was agreed on last September, and the first two reference applications – print management from Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG and network management from Netlabs Inc – are now in place. Applications, in such areas as back-up and restore, user, host and licensing management, upgrade and journaling will soon be announced, with three more to be sorted out by the final quarter. On transaction processing, the main problem has been making Unix suitable for both on-line and batch processing. To this end, a stored requests facility will be included, along with the ability to share a CICS transaction with an IBM Corp mainframe, enabling a Unix server to participate in some of the mainframe’s workload. In general, the roadmap shows Unix V.4 splitting into client and server components over the next few years, with Destiny as the client and the merge of V.4ES (extended security) and MP (multi-processing), due next year, as the main server portion. This release, 4.2, can handle up to 30 processors, and includes an applications programming interface to help software developers, such as database vendors, parallelise their products. Vision 2000 is an additional document to the roadmap – it looks at developments in computing on more general terms, and tries to evaluate what effect this will have on operating system development in the future. The document looks at the effects that more MIPS, memory and bandwidth, plus new trends such as software re-use and objects, will have on the Unix International roadmap. The 60-page document was constructed with help from academics, research and advanced development people, and has as its foundation Unix International’s technology trend survey of semiconductor and networking companies.
