IBM Corp is wooing leading operating system developers, including SunSoft Inc, Novell Inc, and Hewlett-Packard Co to implement their environments to run on top of IBM’s Workplace OS microkernel, IBM sources acknowledged to PC Week. IBM is pushing adoption of the Workplace OS kernel – based on Mach – as a quicker way for vendors to implement their operating systems to the PowerPC chip, enabling vendors to use the kernel as an intermediate layer between their operating systems and the hardware, and avoid the need to convert for hardware-specific features of PowerPC – or whatever other processor may run Workplace OS in the future. The work would be limited to the fairly straightforward task of linking their operating systems to the Workplace OS application programming interfaces. IBM is beta testing an OSF/1 Unix Workplace OS personality and beta versions of Workplace OS/2 for PowerPC will begin in the second quarter. IBM has also committed to doing Workplace OS personalities for OS/400, Taligent, PC-DOS and Windows. IBM’s Personal Software Products division in Austin, Texas is also working on a stripped-down Workplace OS-based operating system that will run on PowerPC-based Personal Digital Assistants, Cliff Reeves, manager of object technology at Austin, told the paper. This will supplement IBM’s current, non-microkernel-based Personal Digital Assistant operating systems, PenDOS and Pen for OS/2, Reeves said.
