January: The year begins with speculation about AT&T Co’s plans to sell off a stake in its Unix System Laboratories subsidiary, which will broaden the ownership of Unix. The prospectus values Unix Systems Labs at $325m: AT&T says it is looking to sell around 30%. At UniForum in Dallas, Texas, Compaq Computer Corp is said to be evaluating the MIPS Computer Systems RISC processor. Open Software Foundation bemoans the $1m tag of its X/Open Co Ltd board ticket. Multi-national Unix users, with a collective buying power of over $100,000m, say they will push the industry to accelerate the delivery of open systems products. Fujitsu Ltd and Sun Microsystems Inc are said to be holding talks on a closer relationship: Fujitsu’s interest in the Sparc RISC chip becomes more apparent as its Amdahl Corp sibling signs for the Sparc. Our sister publication, Unigram, beats the dailies to report that Open Software Foundation is being investigated by the US Government’s Federal Trade Commission over anti-trust violations, sparked by criticism of its controversial Request For Technology scheme by a dozen independent software vendors aggrieved at the Foundation’s business terms and conditions. Former head of the IBM division that developed the RS/6000, Andrew Heller, surfaces as boss of start-up Hal Inc, to build high-performance RISC Unix workstations. In another mopping-up operation, Digital Equipment Corp picks up a 65% stake in a new company to be formed out of Mannesmann AG’s loss-making computer businesses. Data General Corp lets its object-oriented technology go into a management buy-out called HyperDesk. Motorola’s first 88000 customer, Textronix Inc, shuts the door on its workstation business after failing to find a buyer. AT&T’s fight for control of NCR Corp rages: the Dayton firm launches its own top-end transaction processing monitor which will compete with its suitor’s Tuxedo. Dataquest market research figures for 1990 show Sun Microsystems kept its workstation lead with 29.1% of the market, worth $7,400m: Hewlett-Packard took 22.7%, DEC 17.7%, Intergraph Corp 6.8% and IBM Corp 3.5%. Computer Associates, the world’s largest software company, with a strong distate for Unix, comes down off its high horse and enters the Unix lists for the first time, saying it will put its software up under Hewlett-Packard Unix. By the end of the year, the firm has the biggest stand at the year’s premier Unix Expo event. DEC announces 3,500 lay-offs, while Concurrent Computer Corp embarks on a major financial restructuring.

February: Back in the black: Data General Corp finishes its financial year with the first set of profits in eight quarters, proving that investment in open systems can pay; some painful restructuring apart. Spain follows Germany and the UK in demanding X/Open Portability Guide compliance for all future public information technology procurements. The first glimmer of Microsoft Corp’s NT New Technology, which is being designed by VMS architect Dave Cutler. And, with Microsoft stock up to $100 a share, Bill Gates’ personal fortune rises to $4,000m, making him more valuable than the Gross National Product of Bolivia and Afghanistan. The ACE Advanced Computing Environment starts life as the gang of nine: Compaq Computer Corp, Digital Equipment Corp MIPS Computer, Santa Cruz Operation, Ing C Olivetti & Co and Silicon Graphics say they will create a new workstation standard based on the MIPS RISC and Intel’s 80486 running a Unix desktop operating system and NT. IBM’s non-existent sub-$5,000 workstation makes headlines: the RS/6000’s seven-chip set will be shrunk to two.

March: Following 1990’s graphical user-interface wars, a layered Applications Programming Interface, accommodating Open Look, Motif, Windows and Presentation Manager, looks the best bet for the basis an international graphical interface standard. Unlikely bedfellows they may be, but Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems decide to play Romeo and Juliet, collaborating on an object-oriented Distributed Object Management Framework. They plan to converge their opposing remote

procedure call protocols and take the Distributed Object Managament Framework to the Object Management Group, which is hunting for an Object Request Broker standard. The UK’s Barclays Bank Plc is set to become largest European AIX user with a monster contract for up to 3,000 IBM RS/6000 boxes. IBM holds a technology direction demonstration of OSF/1 on its ES/9000 mainframe at the CeBit exhibition in Germany. Oracle Corp launches a parallel server database for multi-processing systems; it’s also seeking an equity investor. Two years after defecting from Motorola’s 88000, Stratus Computer launches a fault-tolerant computer based upon Intel’s 80860 RISC with Unix System v.4. Hewlett-Packard’s Snake workstations are spied in Birmingham, UK, at the CAD/CAM ’91 show.

April: Hewlett-Packard sets the workstation world on its ear, introducing its Snake RISC workstations topping at 76 MIPS – 72 SPECmarks; a low-end Bushmaster model is planned, to ship in March. In a cheeky move, the Open Software Foundation presents Motif to the IEEE standards board for a direct ballot as the de jure graphical user-interface standard: Unix International replies with a similar bid for Open Look. IEEE smells a rat and rejects both. ACE launches itself, saying its model is the personal computer revolution of the 1980s. Bill Gates is touted as the force behind ACE – some see it as another Microsoft-on-Intel play. First problems at ACE as the Apache Group says it wants the ACE-MIPS hardware running Unix V.4, not Open Desktop. Unix System Labs works on a binary desktop version of Unix for computers with 4Mb RAM, 40Mb hard disk. UK firm Tadpole Technology develops a Sparc-based notebook which is due by year-end. Unix System Labs investors are Sun Microsystems, Motorola Inc, Amdahl Ltd, Novell Inc (the largest), Ing C Olivetti, ICL Plc, Toshiba Corp, Oki Electric Co, NEC Corp, Fujitsu Ltd and Taiwan’s Institute for Information Industry. IBM wants to shed a further 9,000 jobs. Pyramid leaps forward in the server market with its long-awaited MIPS R3000-based systems AT&T Co, Olivetti and Siemens Nixdorf are OEM buyers. The Object Management Group shortlists five technologies for its Object Request Broker technology – Hewlett-Packard-Sun, HyperDesk, NCR-Object Design Inc, DEC and APM – pundits forecast an acrimonious selection battle. DEC takes a stake in MasPar Computer confirming its entry into the massively parallel market via that route. Sun angers some of its 500 US dealers, telling them they can’t market any of the Sparc-compatible machines. On the back of the federal investigation, Addamax Inc launches a $100m anti-trust action against the Open Software Foundation: its secure software was snubbed in favour of SecureWare technology for the security elements in OSF/1. Addamax claims the Foundation acted illegally, conspiring to fix prices for software technology and providing competitive advantages to OSF sponsors by dictating standards favourable to their strategies.