Abacus Research & Development Inc, the Albuquerque, New Mexico start-up that designed Executor, which back in 1991 was the first software-only Apple Macintosh System-under-Unix product we ever heard of, says it’s now shipping the thing for Motorola Inc-based NeXT Computer Inc boxes and has managed to corral between 1,000 and 2,000 user sites. The Abacus approach has been to emulate the Motorola 68000 chip that Apple Computer Inc uses, calling its stuff a synthetic CPU. It says it’s now able to run Mac programs such as Word, Excel, Quicken, Mac Money and a bunch of games quite well, more than it could 18 months ago. Quirkier programs are still harder. Abacus however claims that its CPU technology is portable and that it currently has a version for NeXTstep-on-Intel in beta test and another for Mac-on-MS-DOS machines in alpha test. It is in the MS-DOS market that Abacus hopes to make its fortune, beginning in September, when it plans to launch Executor/DOS 1.0, a $100 system it says will run a lot of the small programs Apple folks are so fond of. It won’t be able to run software like Quark Express or Aldus PageMaker and what it does run will only be monochrome but it’s hoping to get Executor/DOS 2.0 to run everything including colour. Executor/DOS 1.0 would require a 80386 machine or better. Abacus has other plans as well. In October it plans to unveil Executor running on Digital Equipment Corp’s Alpha RISC box running under X Window, reckoning that that sector of the marketplace is less competitive than others. It will then follow that move with a Sparc implementation, again under X Window. It says it has no trouble handling both big and little endian hardware and claims its technology, based on dynamic recompilation, is superior to what Apple itself has. It believes Apple will eventually come around to licensing it. Founder Clifford Matthews is definitely looking for a larger company to cut him a deal.
