Software house Keicho Corp has signed with Oregon State University for joint marketing of the Orbs Oregon Rule-based System expert system shell, and they will start out with a Unix version in July, following up with a version for OS/2 within the year: features of the system include modularity in which several independently – related rules can be combined to create a new rule, thus making system building more efficient and enabling small systems to be enlarged over time as the knowledge base increase; Orbs is currently written in Common Lisp but Keicho plans to rewrite it in C and will also improve and Japanisze the user interface; Orbs costs $32,000 on a DEC VAX, $16,000 on the Sun 3 and Sony News workstations; Keicho has an exclusive licence for the Asian market, including Australia, and it is hoping to sell 30 copies of the program in the first year.
