In Tokyo last week, X/Open Co Ltd announced its Issue 4 of the X/Open Portability Guide, the new common application interface announced several weeks ago by its units in Europe and the US. At the announcement, a number of Japanese manufacturers announced support of XPG4. NEC Corp for example supports XPG4 under its Solution 21, which is a concept framework for new systems, and NEC plans to ship a group of XPG4-conforming products, including a C language product. In the past, NEC’s EWS4800 series was the first workstation to conform with XPG3 in Japan. The company has set up various organisations in-house to promote development of open systems, including its Open Systems Technology Center in Princeton, New Jersey and a Computer & Communications Open Systems Technology Division, as well as an Open Systems Centre in Tokyo for the purpose of open system verification. The centres also provide a Unix products conversion environment for independent software vendors. Fujitsu Ltd also won XPG3 branding for its three Unix operating systems: UXP/M V10L10 for M-series of mainframes and VP series of supercomputers, UXP/DS for the DS/90 7000 series of workstations, and UXP/DS V4.0 for the DS/90 sold outside Japan DS/90 machines come from ICL Plc. Hitachi has received XPG3 branding for its workstation operating system HI-UX/WE2. Messages of support were also received from Oki Electric Industry Co Ltd, Omron Corp, Yokogawa Hewlett-Packard Co, and the Japanese arms of Digital Equipment Corp, Compagnie des Machines Bull SA, NCR Corp, Ing C Olivetti & Co Spa, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG, Sun Microsystems Inc and Unisys Corp.
