Mountain View, California-based Metaphor Computer Systems Inc, the company whose graphical user interface technology has so impressed IBM that it has formed Patriot Partners as a joint venture with Metaphor to exploit it (CI No 1,507), reports that Ethernet inventor and local networking pioneer Robert Metcalfe will be serving as a chief advisor to the Patriot Partners venture. Patriot will create a new suite of software intended to simplify development, increase development productivity and enable single application designs to work with multiple operating systems and networks. The target is an open, standards-based, software environment available to all interested software and hardware vendors that will run under OS/2, IBM’s AIX and other major versions of Unix. It will run on a wide range of personal computers and workstations, and number of different networks will be supported, without requiring adaptation by the application developer. The long-term aim is to provide microcomputer applications with support for a software technologies not provided in current popular software environments – class libraries for object-oriented programming, multimedia support, end-user visual programming capability and structured access to expert system facilities. It will seek to exploit the potential of 32-bit architecture, greater memory and display capabilities, and the client-server model for distributed computing.
