Wang Laboratories Inc has been keeping its Unix strategy tightly under wraps to try to ensure that nothing of substance would leak out until this morning, but now all can be revealed. The Lowell, Massachusetts company, biggest casualty yet of the market’s break-neck rush into open standards, is pulling out all the stops to make up for lost time, and has picked Innovation on Standards as the tag for its Open/Architecture strategy, which brings its applications – sexiest of which is the Freestyle multi-media information processing system – into the Unix world; office automation will follow the same route. Wang has eschewed the rush to RISC and has settled on the Intel 80386 and 80486 as the basis of its Unix personal computers and servers, choos ing the Santa Cruz Operation Unix System V.386 3.2 to run across the full product line. Core of the new product line are Open/Servers which will be the basis of Wang’s planned client server architecture, which will also embrace its proprietary VS business computers and per sonal computers running Unix, MS-DOS and OS/2. The company is supporting local networks using Banyan Vines, Novell NetWare, Microsoft LAN Manager and IBM LAN Server as well as TCP/IP. Joined both Unix camps Wang is hedging its bets and has joined both Unix International and the Open Software Found ation, and has adopted the latter’s Motif user interface, basing its new Unix Clearview ob ject-oriented desktop manager on it and bundl ing it with all Open Desktop systems. Also new is the WP/x character-based word processing program at from $1,000, pitched at those fami li-ar with its word processing packages – but the company is only making promises about bringing its imaging and its other office auto mation products over. Wang has opted for the Micro Channel and the Multibus II System Archi tecture as well as the AT bus, but not the EISA bus. It is also promising compliance with the X/Open Common Applications Environment and Posix, Network File System and Remote File Sharing. On the hardware front, its initial offering is the Open/Server family using the 80486 or 80386 with input-output co-processors running SCO Unix and SCO Open Desktop for X Window-based client-server architectures. Wang is promising symmetric multiprocessing using Santa Cruz’s NPX extensions in future. IN/ix on the VS machines will continue to be supp orted and it plans to implement Banyan’s Vines and Novell’s Portable NetWare on the servers. The Open/Servers start with the CPU, cache, 4Mb system memory, 1.2Mb floppy and a 145Mb SCSI disk and 150Mb cartridge tape, at $22,690 for the 80386-based version and $27,690 for the 80486. Separate iAPX-86 processors are used for input-output and such, with Multibus II to link everything, and Wang hints that it will add 80860 RISC co-processors in future. The things have 10 slots in the main cabinet with another 10 available in a separate one; disk can go to 6Gb. An 80386SX is offered as an optional Ethernet co-processor, an 80186 is used for direct connection of every 16 char acter terminals. SCO Unix V/386 for Wang PC300 micros starts at $600, Open Desktop at $1,000.
