In Tokyo, Unix Labs president Larry Dooling was assisted in his announcement by representatives from the five Pacific Rim companies, and by Jim Clark, president of Unix System Laboratories Pacific, who is resident in Tokyo. Dooling said it was appropriate that the announcement was made in Tokyo concurrently with the US because of the support that Japanese companies have given to open systems from the beginning of AT&T’s operations there. Fujitsu director and general manager of open systems development, Takeshi Maruyama, said in his remarks that software was the key to open systems and compliance with industry standards was important; Fujitsu runs AT&T’s System V.4 on everything from desktop systems to supercomputers. Gary Gong from the Taiwan institute outlined his organisation’s aims, which include the fostering of research and development; its activities in the fields of software engineering, operating systems with Chinese language support, artificial intelligence and systems integration; and its hopes that it would become Unix Labs’partner in Taiwan. NEC’s representative Inoue Takehiko said that his company’s purpose in investing at this stage in Unix Labs was to support the development of Unix and the growth of a healthy Unix Labs so that customers can use Unix-based systems with confidence. NEC also supports use of Unix across a wide range of systems, but not yet in native mode on its large mainframes. Oki Electric’s general manager of the Computer Systems Development Division Shinozuka emphasised the opportunity investment gave Oki for strengthening its relationship with Unix Labs in development of software for workstation, server and fault-tolerant computers. And Shigenori Matsushita, manager of the Information Processing and Control Systems Planning Office at Toshiba said his company had been eager to joint a team under the leadership of Mr Dooling to help in the development of high quality, stable systems that would satisfy customer needs. According to Dooling, current holders will be invited to increase their stakes to a maximum of 4.6% each as AT&T cuts its stake to 20% or so. The first meeting of the new board is planned for the end of this month or the first week in May he said.
