Wind River Systems Inc’s VxWorks real time operating system is now available running on Intel’s 80960 RISC processor, will support the X Window System by the end of the year, and the Emeryville, California company says that several new releases are planned for the beginning of 1990 – at least one of which is thought to be for Motorola’s 88000 architecture. Applications written under Unix – or VMS, of which versions 4.5 and above are now supported – are off-loaded from the host CPU, usually a workstation, via TCP/IP, Ethernet or Network File System to a stand-alone VME-based box in which VxWorks resides, running on a member of Motorola’s 68000 family, Sun’s Sparc chip, or now the 80960. VxWorks then takes charge of the applications and executes them for use in real time environments. VxWorks is less than an operating system – it has no compilers, debuggers or editors – but is more than an application, as it manages and controls processing operations. Jerry Fiddler, president of the firm, and over in Europe for the official launch of Wind River’s French subsidiary in Paris, says that it takes roughly one man-year to implement for each new processor environment. Eight year old Wind River has another office in Tokyo, and plans UK and West German sales operations.
