The shadowy collaboration between Apple Computer Inc and Novell Inc to put the Macintosh Finder user interface and Toolbox applications development aids atop Novell’s DR DOS clone of Microsoft Corp’s MS-DOS and network client software to give the poor relations in the graphical user interface stakes, the iAPX-86 personal computer users, some of the joys of the Macintosh, has now been pinned down pretty firmly by MacWeek, and it appears that the resulting product will be marketed by Novell. Formal announcement is not expected before the autumn, and the product is planned for the first half of next year, with the prime target market seen as MS-DOS users that have not yet succumbed to the blandishments of Windows and might otherwise jump straight to NT. The answer to the key question – what applications will it run – appears to be that it will run unmodified character-based MS-DOS applications, and converted Mac applications, to the extent that any developers are prepared to convert them, and will run on iAPX-86 processors from the 80386 up. The companies are believed to be looking at ways to have it support Windows applications as well, but the paper was told that that problem has not yet been solved. The partners have already explained the rationale of the effort to developers that already offer versions of their applications for multiple environments, and more developers will be briefed at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, set for San Jose next month.

Companion

According to MacWeek, the development will be the first fruits of a planned family of multi-environment technologies that the company is calling Companion, which also involves plans for a thorough overhaul of the Macintosh interface over the next few years. The Apple-Novell effort is said to have the blessing of Intel Corp, which is providing technical assistance and compatibility testing. The first version of the new software will provide the System 7 interface, a QuickDraw emulator and support for QuickDraw GX, a translator that maps Apple’s hierarchical file system to the MS-DOS directory structure, and integrated AppleTalk and NetWare network services, the paper hears. It will lack support for Apple events; QuickTime; the Data Access Manager; the Edition Manager; the Macintosh Communications Toolbox; and any hardware not found in standard Intel systems, such as SCSI, NuBus and the Apple Desktop Bus. It will include an extension mechanism, and QuickTime, AppleScript and Apple Open Collaboration Environment are being converted for the environment, but are not expected to be ready until the second half of next year. The core of the product will be a translation layer between the converted Macintosh Toolbox and DR DOS. When converted Mac applications call routines in the Toolbox, it will translate the calls and pass them to DR DOS if necessary. All the tools needed to convert Mac applications written in C and C++ to the planned environment are available now on standard MS-DOS machines, and the pair will designate a preferred suite of MS-DOS development tools, including Metaware Inc’s High C/C++ 386 compiler and mdb debugger and Phar Lap Software Inc’s 386Link object linker, sources told the paper. There is a sort of hidden agenda, because according to MacWeek, Apple believes that implementing as much of Macintosh System as possible for iAPX-86 will increase the number of programs that will run in native mode on the planned PowerPC-based Macs because the potential of the huge MS-DOS base will give Mac developers an incentive to make their code portable. Software converted for the Apple-Novell environment will also be portable to the PowerPC – and to any other RISC processors Apple may support in the future. In the medium term, the Apple-IBM Corp Taligent Inc joint venture will offer kernels that will provide an almost universally portable user environment. The kernels will act as the hardware-specific interface in place of current operating systems, and application programming interfaces such as the Mac user interface and IBM’s Workplace Shell will beco

me modules that run on top of these kernels.