IBM Tips Hat on New RTs; Says They'll Run AIX and OS/2
 
Copyright (c) 1989, McGraw-Hill, Inc.
NEW YORK (Microbytes Daily News Service) --- Though IBM is still
mum on most of the details about its upcoming RT workstations,
company officials revealed a few details this week at a seminar
on personal computers sponsored by the Salomon Brothers
investment house.
 
The delayed RT will be officially announced sometime in the
first quarter of next year, IBM Personal Systems chief James
Cannavino confirmed. The new workstation (or workstations),
expected by industry observers to be based on a proprietary,
"second-generation" RISC CPU, will be built on the Micro Channel
bus architecture and will "have the broadest spectrum of hardware
in the industry," Cannavino said.
 
Cannavino also revealed for the first time that the new RT will
be at home in both the Unix and SAA (IBM's System Applications
Architecture) worlds; that is, it will run both AIX and some
version of OS/2. The workstation had long been expected to use
AIX, IBM's implementation of Unix (possibly with the addition
of the NeXTstep development environment IBM licensed from NeXT,
though this will likely come later). Two weeks ago at Comdex,
Cannavino and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said that the
32-bit version of OS/2 might be available for RISC platforms in
the future. This announcement raised speculation that OS/2
would run eventually on the RT, which Cannavino has now
confirmed.
 
At the same time, Cannavino indicated that no effort will be made
to incorporate AIX into the SAA standard, which means that the
company will support at least 2 distinct desktop environments.
The Unix world appears to be moving toward standardization on X
Window and OSF/Motif. (IBM is a member of OSF, which recently
announced that AIX would not be the core of its Unix operating
system.) IBM has solved a key problem with this announcement: how
to balance the need for an SAA-compliant workstation for
true-Blue shops yet provide industry standard Unix for non-Blue
engineering and scientific users.
 
IBM gave no timeframe for releasing an RT OS/2, and in fact
Cannavino tried to back away from his own statement later in
the briefing when he said IBM has not yet picked the specific
instruction architectures to which OS/2 will be ported.
 
In any case, a version of OS/2 for the RT would likely not be
able to run existing OS/2 applications right out of the box,
since the workstation won't be based on an Intel 80x86 CPU. But
there are several ways the RT could use OS/2 applications:
either it could contain an Intel 80x86 coprocessor to run both
OS/2 and applications (which would be possible in the Micro
Channel architecture), or it could support a software emulation
scheme (such as what SoftPC does for DOS programs on Motorola
chips) or a file transformer and recompiler (such as what
Hunter Systems' XDOS does under Unix).
 
                              --- Andy Reinhardt
 
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