Digital Equipment Corp has had to think again about its decision to scrap its OSF/1 operating system development for its MIPStations (CI No 1,931), because of to demand from customers already working on OSF/1 projects. DEC’s announcement that it would concentrate on OSF/1 only for the Alpha range made enough customers angry for DEC to go back to its business plan and think again. It’s a financial decision – revenues will be significant, said DEC spokesman Chris Sarfas. The provarication has set back the effort by six months, said Sarfas, and OSF/1 for the Alphas will be now emerge first, probably early next year. DEC already has the incomplete version 1 of the OSF/1 operating system out on its MIPS line, and it’s this that customers are now working on. Dropping version 2 of OSF/1 would have left those on-going developments undeployable. With the decline of the Advanced Computing Environment effort, DEC says it would have no problems in licensing its OSF/1 work to other vendors of MIPS Computer Systems Inc R-series RISC-based machines.
