UNIX standard

[Moderator, John S. Quarterman]

From: uunet!wlbr.eaton.com!etn-rad!jru (John Unekis)

   We recently had some SUN reps come to give a presentation about SPARC.
   They were strongly suggesting that due to their relationship with AT&T
   (that is AT&T will soon sell SPARC) it will soon be the case that if you
   are not a SPARC machine you will not *really* be UNIX compatible. They
   were talking about a coming binary standard, so that you could buy a
   program written for UNIX and know that it would run on your UNIX machine
   the same way you know that PC software will always run on your Intel/PC.
   This binary standard would assumably be based on the SPARC instruction
   set.
   Is this stuff true or is it just marketing hype? Is UNIX really going to
   become hardware dependent? What about all of us out here with our 680x0
   or 80x86 or VAXen or whatever? Are we going to be second-class UNIX users,
   unable to run the bulk of UNIX software? Can anybody out there clarify
   this?

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   Any opinion expressed above is mine only. {ihnp4 or voder}!wlbr!etn-rad!jru

Volume-Number: Volume 13, Number 34