China seems to have come to the conclusion independently of IBM Japan Ltd that its personal computer industry needs to be rallied around a single BIOS and the the State Bureau of Technical Supervision has issued national standards for the Chinese versions of MS-DOS, which are to go into effect beginning from April 4 next year, the Xinhua news agency reports. The standards are intended to embrace Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as mainland China. The Beijing Legend Group, the largest computer manufacturer in China, has signed a $1m contract with Microsoft Corp to develop a standard Chinese version of MS-DOS: the Chinese version of MS-DOS 6.22, which was developed by Legend, is regarded as one of the first Chinese implementations to comply with the newly-issued national standards. The Beijing Hope Computer Co, which comes under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has also developed an MS-DOS variant called UCDOS, and the China State Bureau of Statistics is to install it on all its computers nationwide. As reported, IBM Japan is trying to mobilise major personal computer manufacturers arounds a single standard Chinese language operating system that it is developing (CI No 2,485).
