Open Group further standardises Unix 98

Menlo Park, 20 May 98 The Open Group, amongst others consisting of Siemens Nixdorf, IBM, HP and Sun, has developed a series of product standards for Unix 98: the Unix 98 base, a workstation and a server. The group already has registered the availability of products that carry the Unix 98 brand.

This new set of product standards, which are designed to work with and complement the recently announced network computing programme, provides the server functionality for open platform and Internet server as required in The Open Group's IT DialTone Architecture.

The combination of the Internet server and Unix 98 mandates requirements to support standardized threads, real-time, large file system Application Programming Interfaces, is Y2K and 64 bit clean and architecture neutral. Unix 98 Workstation adds CDE, a standard graphical user interface.

The server adds the following standardized web services to Unix 98: Java Virtual Machine support, TCP/IP, SNMP, Hypertext Protocol Transfer Services, Domain Name Service, Terminal & File Services, Mail Services Client Booting Services, Time Services and Directory Services.

The Open Group has about 200 members in government, academia, finance, health care, commerce and telecommunications. The members have combined IT budgets in excess of $55 billion annually. The group was formed in February 1996 by merging X/Open Company and the Open Software Foundation. The nine sponsors of The Open Group are Digital Equipment, Hewlett-Packard, Siemens Nixdorf, Fujitsu, Hitachi, International Business Machines, Novell and Sun.

Sandra Wermer