Unisoft Ltd, the London and New York-based Unix house that has been quietly transforming itself into a system integrator and bespoke application developer has broken its near silence of the last couple of years and come out with what it calls a highly portable version of Unix System V.4 – UniPlus+ System V.4/MIPS. Rubbing salt into the wounds of ACE purists, it’s designed for MIPS Computer Systems Inc’s R3000 and R4000 RISCs, including MIPS’ own ACE Advanced RISC Computing-compliant systems. The Unisoft operating system – developed in conjunction with MIPS complies with Unix System Labs Inc’s MIPS System V.4 applications binary interface and MIPS’ own version of Unix Risc/OS. Uniplus+ will run programs written to the application binary interface from the ACE MIPS Special Interest Group (Apache) members – MIPS, NEC Corp, Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA, Pyramid Technology Corp, Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme GmbH, Sony Corp, Tandem Computers Inc and Unix System Laboratories Inc – as well as existing MIPS applications. UniPlus+ is out from June 1 as a custom implementation or as a binary conversion kit for OEM customers. Unisoft will produce a binary, shrink-wrapped version of the operating system when ACE’s Hardware Abstraction Layer, HAL, is complete.
