Microware Systems Corp of Des Moines, Iowa and Stellar One Corp, headquartered in Seattle, Washington have formed a marketing alliance for their interactive television products. Microware is the developer of the OS/9-derived Digital Audio/Video Interactive Decoder, or David, operating system for television set-top boxes for which Stellar One produces what it claims to be the first commercially-available application development environment, Stellar 1000. Microware’s David adds support for high-speed networks, communications protocols, synchronisation and playback of decoded MPEG files and control of infra-red remote controllers to its OS-9 real-time operating system. The company claims sales of over 5m copies of OS-9 so far; it is used in various multimedia applications, including CD-i, interactive television and other video-on-demand applications, as well as more ‘serious’ arenas such as traffic light control systems and particle accelerators. The Stellar 1000 environment enables developers to do real-time debugging and quick set-top code downloading. It has 4Mb memory, Ethernet connection and external abort and reset switches.
