ClieNT Server NEWS
Beta'd As BillyGram
The Independent Observer of Microsoft, Windows NT and Other
Phenomena
New York, May 24-28 1993
Premier Issue
ClieNT Server NEWS is published weekly by G-2 Computer Intelligence
Inc, Glen Head, New York
Publisher: Maureen O'Gara.
Technical Editor: Geof Wheelwright.
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HEADLINES
-------------------------
New York, May 24-28 1993
Premier Issue
SUBJECT TO CHANGE, NT MAY MAKE DEADLINE
OEMs TOLD IT SHIPS JUNE 15
Microsoft has been telling key OEMs that it will start shipping both
the client and server portions of Windows NT 3.1 to resellers
worldwide on Tuesday June 15. The software is reportedly scheduled
to be released to manufacturing on Saturday June 5. The commitment
comes amid mounting press reports that NT, or at least the NT
Advanced Server, would seriously slip Microsoft's self-imposed June
30 delivery deadline. OEMs said they felt 80% confident the June 15
schedule would hold. So, it seems, does Microsoft. Microsoft said
last week it would need to meet the June 15 reseller ship date to
meet its June 30 deadline for general availability. It also said
that all it's doing now is trying to get NT to the lowest possible
bug count, measured against performance, and ship the stuff even
though contigents inside the company want it tweaked further. Having
reportedly showed no red flags yet, the debugging could turn up
serious enough flaws to hold up production.
For that reason Microsoft last week was expecting its chairman Bill Gates to be
conservative in his Windows World announcement of the product this
week and say that the client could slip 60 days and the server 90
days though it is still targeted to make deadline.
The company believes such a forecast is a worst-case projection and any slippage
is more likely to be only a few days or weeks. However, the
situation is reportedly so fluid it changes by the moment. Hence
Microsoft officials can maintain there is no firm date for shipment.
Depending on NT's status the weekend of May 22-23, Microsoft said
Gates and VP Paul Maritz, who will preside over the NT press
conference Monday May 24, could decide to be more optimistic and go
for broke. Significant performance gains have reportedly been made
since the March Beta which has now gone through many updates and can
no longer be considered representative of the product, Microsoft
says. If delivery is delayed Microsoft can rationalize availability
and point to the 80,000 betas it now says are in the field. Anybody
can buy a $69 Developers' Kit and get the system. The issue is
performance. It says customers are demanding a relatively hardened
product rather than a quick release to full deployment. However it's
still under considerable pressure to deliver.
PRICES ARE $495 & $2,995;
PROMOS COULD MAKE IT $295 & $1,495
Microsoft has fixed list prices at $495 for the client and $2,995
for the server. Six-month promotions are supposed to bring prices to
$295 for the client for upgrades to OS/2 and Windows 3.x and $1,495
for the server. It is also expected to price SNA and SQL Server,
both due Q3. Microsoft is thought to be pricing against recent
desktop Unix entries such as SunSoft's Solaris-on-Intel and Univel's
UnixWare. Solaris x86 is due to ship May 29 at $795. Novell's Univel
joint venture halved its prices in March as a pre-emptive strike
against the threat of Windows NT. The UnixWare client-side Personal
Edition is now $250, the cheapest Unix on the block, and its
Application Server is now $1,300. Microsoft has previously
speculated that the software would be subject to almost immediate
street discounting but it can't let NT prices sink too low without
impacting Windows 3.1. Resellers are supposed to enforce the $295
price. OEMs themselves are expecting varied discounts hinged on
volumes. One said Microsoft would likely do most of its OEM business
at 80% off. Microsoft has been burning the midnight oil attempting
to get NT out on schedule, with staffers putting in 70 and 80 hours
weeks. Travel has been curtailed so people could focus on the launch
today in Atlanta and outsiders who have visited Redmond over the
last 11 years say they've never seen the intensity level so high.
Even with all the work, it is still generally acknowledged that it
will months and months before the software is sufficiently hardened
to run mission-critical applications with aplomb. However, it will
reportedly be positioned as "the most powerful platform for
client/server computing" available. As a fall back, it will be
called "the best of three worlds: the workstation, the PC and the
network server."
MILLER RESURRECTS ACE VISION
WITH NEW NT-ON-MIPS COMPANY
One-time architect of the ACE Initiative Bob Miller, erstwhile chief
of MIPS Computer Systems Inc and its successor MIPS Technologies
Inc, is bent on hammering out his initial vision. In February, he
started NeTpower Inc, a brand new hardware maker dedicated to
building Windows NT boxes based on MIPS' R4x00 RISC chips. The
Sunnyvale, California-based fledgling is backed by a first-round
investment of around $6.1m from MIPS' owner Silicon Graphics Inc,
Stanford University and venture sources including Institutional
Venture Partners, the Mayfield Fund, New Enterprise Associates and
Onset Enterprise Associates. NeTpower expects the money to last
until early next year when it contemplates going for a second round
that it will attempt to minimize by virtue of the cash flow it
should be generating from selling its products. It figures if it
needs much more than that it might as well close up shop. NT will
have failed. If NT hits, however, NeTpower believes it will be doing
a few hundred million dollars worth of business in three to five
years. The 25-man company has collected what it regards as a star-
studded string of old Unix veterans to run the joint. Besides
Miller, it's got co-founder Edward Frank as VP of R&D, a
Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, architect of Sun's
Sparcstation 10 desktop multiprocessor and a principal in the
creation of First Person Inc, Sun's recently formed highly secretive
consumer electronics subsidiary. Then there's VP and chief architect
Skip Stritter, another co-founder, who also helped start MIPS and
was there as VP, development programs. In a previous life, Stritter
had been Motorola's chief architect on the 68000 microprocessor
family. NeTpower's also picked up sales VP Ralph Mele from MasPar
Computer Corporation where he had been VP, worldwide sales and
support after running SGI's North American Field Organization. It
got its marketing VP Linda Hargrove from HP's General Systems
Division where she had been worldwide marketing manager for the
HP9000 Series 800 machines and it got its product marketing director
John Novitsky from Intel where he managed Pentium's product planning
and technical marketing teams. NeTpower expects to deliver its first
three unnamed turnkey machines in volume this fall: a sub-$5,000
entry-level R4000 desktop, a sub-$10,000 high-end R4400 desktop and
a low-end sub-$10,000 R4400 deskside server. The entrants presuppose
a networked client/server architecture. Next year, in what will be
co-founder Ed Frank's third implementation of a commercial symmetric
multiprocessor, it anticipates breaking into SMP. The boxes are
currently in external alpha sites where the company hopes to
validate some of the assumptions still swirling around NT and the
MIPS architecture such as whether a MIPS NT machine can hack it in
the Intel environment as a price/performance player. NeTpower
machines are meant to look, feel and smell like a PC. They fit in a
baby AT form factor and incorporate ISA expansion slots. The company
has turned its nose up at EISA as unnecessary and used its own high-
speed local bus. There are built-in SCSI and networking resources.
Its beta experience this summer will help NeTpower sort out exactly
how the machines should be configured. Stuff like the monitor,
standard RAM size (probably at least 16MB), and whether to make CDs
optional versus price. The NT market being akin to a continent in
formation, such seemingly obvious requirements are not at all that
obvious, making NeTpower a valuable case study. The entry client
machine will probably use a 50MHz R4000 MIPS chip and deliver around
60 Specmarks performance; the server will probably use a 75MHz R4400
and deliver around 90 SpecMarks. The box in between is currently
iffier about such things as chip frequency and size of secondary
cache. NeTpower has decided to use Acer's new PICA R4000/4400 six-
chip chipset designed specifically for NT PCs for its initial
machines. Later it will develop its own chipsets. Like other NT
merchants, NeTpower will have to meet ISV and developer skepticism
about whether the Windows NT APIs are really identical for both
Intel and MIPS machines. They're also going to have to counter a lot
of Unix FUD on this issue too. However, according to NeTpower, all
the current evidence suggests that yes, they are. Meaning the
developer doesn't really even have to port his software from one to
the other, simply recompile. The issue is an important one to the
whole MIPS NT contingent since the available software is the only
way any of them can leverage into volumes. NeTpower and its ilk will
also have to prove that NT RISC machines actually deliver superior
performance at lower cost than their competitors. In the absence of
any accepted benchmark standards, the evidence is largely anecdotal.
For instance, NeTpower believes its R4000 machine can outperform a
66MHz 489DX2 by a factor of two on integer and a factor of seven on
floating point. Such claims need validation.
NeTpower figures to add considerable value to the standard MIPS NT
machine and it figures it will get a lot of the technology it adds
such as interconnect, NFS and tuned servers by using its machines
itself internally. As a result, it's doing what almost everyone says
can't be done or shouldn't be done with a 1.0 operating system
release: It's running the company on it. Everything mission-critical
from manufacturing and financial to marketing and sales,
engineering, chip design, board design and E-mail is reportedly
running on NT and as NeTpower's own machines come on-line it's
phasing out the 486DX2 boxes it started with. Its own internal needs
account for its port of NFS to Windows NT, for instance. It will
also probably provide NT with additional TCP/IP services. The
company expects to license these kinds of systems level improvements
to other NT OEMs, ISVs and Microsoft itself. Other value-adds will
focus on graphics and ease of use. SGI, an investor, is reportedly
interested in NeTpower as an opportunity to get its graphics
technology into the high-end PC space. NeTpower will work on 3D
capabilities and full-motion video. And although the product isn't
ready yet it's working on an auto-config feature that will
automatically install all the peripherals that will be used.
NeTpower plans on tapping three distribution channels. It will begin
with direct sales to Fortune 500 accounts through its offices in
Boston, Los Angeles, Dallas and New York. These will be backed by a
telesales unit mostly focused on fulfilling the demand prompted by
the direct sales people. Next year it will seek out VARs. It's
delaying third-party involvement because the NT infrastructure
probably won't support VARs making money this year. The NT market
needs to develop the software and third-party hardware that the
coming months should bring. Although initial units will go mostly to
ISVs, NeTpower estimates its markets lay not only with software
developers, but with the financial analysts (where it reckons NT
should shine), all the various CAD niches and the technical
workstation crowd as well as client/server computing or general-
purpose corporare computing.
NT DAY ONE: WHAT HAPPENS NOW?
by Amy Wohl
Okay. So the NT cat is out of the bag. Has you life changed?
Probably not yet. But depending on what happens in the next six to
12 months your choice of computing platform (and your choices) may
change quite a bit.
Think of the operating system market as a kind of trade-off line
with NT as the newest alternative. Of course, there are actually
dozens of operating systems, but if you're trying to buy a server
operating system starting now, there are really only three choices
that count:
* IBM's OS/2 2.1 (newly announced, just in time for Comdex, on May
18).
* Dozens of varieties of Unix.
* Microsoft's NT.
If you need to implement a mission-criticl application in 1993, it
is really unlikely that you'd turn to NT. That is not a comment on
the goodness of Microsoft's offering, but rather on the reality of
the nature of operating systems. Immature operating systems need
testing, breaking in and refining; that can't happen until after the
product is announced, shipped and in the hands of thousands of users
who will stretch it in unpredictable ways. This process can take
years; Microsoft's Windows product, for instance, took seven years
to become an overnight success. It isn't likely to take less than 12
months.
While many large users are likely to buy copies of NT to test and
experiment with, this will not represent commitment or volume sales,
only curiosity.
In this interim period, OS/2 and Unix get (one more time) another
chance. If OS/2 2.1 is particularly good and its follow-on product,
the Micro Kernel, ships on a timely basis, OS/2 will continue to
increase its bandwidth, particularly in the highly desirable large
accounts. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of large accounts have OS/2
projects in progress; once the coding starts, it is unlikely to be
interrupted by the announcement of a new operating system.
The news of increased convergence and harmony in the Unix community
also gives rise to the possibility that Unix will be seen as a good
server platform. This is enhanced by the beginnings of shipments of
the PowerPC chip, together with announcements of software vendors'
commitments to the platform. Too, Apple is porting all of the
Macintosh software, making it available of a number of RISC/Unix
environments, starting with Sun, IBM and HP. Again, large customers
can immediately satisfy their needs on an existing, tested and
robust environment that is continuing to grow.
Of course, nothing is likely to stop NT. Short of a major bug that
causes significant consternation for an extended time, it is
unlikely that Microsoft and NT will fail to become a major server
platform. But this will take time. NT will be announced with
substantial commitments of software, but this software must itself
be successfully ported (or written) and shipped. While IBM and the
Unix community can cross their figures and hope that NT stumbles,
giving them additional time to increase their installed base, it is
likely that NT will move substantially ahead by the 1995 timeframe
unless:
* The Taligent piece of the IBM/Apple strategy starts to
successfully surface and pulls substantial industry and customer
support; or
* Software vendors find that the NT market is slow to develop and
(as happened with OS/2) NT commitments don't necessarily mean NT
software in the market; or
* Microsoft shoots itself in the foot by shipping buggy software or
fails to provide adequate support for what is surely the most
complex product they have ever shipped. This, in itself, is probably
the worthy subject of another column.
Amy Wohl is a well-known speaker and writer, famous for her sharp
tongue and clear sight. She is the editor of The TrendsLetter, a
monthly newsletter which comments of computer technology for users.
IS PENTIUM HEXED?
Intel's much ballyhoo'd Pentium chip is bedeviled in more ways than
one. Not only won't it be delivered to OEMs in any significant
volumes until at least October, it's also reportedly crippled by
poor compiler technology, a recurring Intel shortcoming. The
compilers are so poor that a source intimate with the situation says
Microsoft is not going to recompile Windows NT for the thing. Not
being in the compiler business, Intel has sent the beta compiler to
third parties such as Unix System Laboratories, the Santa Cruz
Operation and compiler houses. It seems from these betas that there
are three ways of compiling: optimizing for the Pentium, for the 486
and somewhere in between. Other than skinny volumes, the compiler
issue may be one of the reasons why Microsoft says Pentium doesn't
count for much in its first-year NT sales projections. It's also
claimed to be one of the reasons why Microsoft is so interested in
the MIPS RISC chip. Some recall that Microsoft originally started
NT's development on an Intel I860 part and contend they threw it out
because the software was so bad. Others mitigate the point by noting
that the 860 was intended to be a numeric co-processor, not a
general-purpose chip designed to be programmable. Be that as it may,
Pentium is still confounded by its inability to ship in volume. Only
its pet customers are getting parts and even those are being doled
out sparingly. Its top five accounts, Compaq, Dell, NCR, NEC and
perhaps HP, have been promised only 2,000 to 3,000 Pentiums apiece
until at least the fall. The situation is so bad the industry has
taken to what it's calling "tea-bagging" it: Dipping the chip into a
box long enough for a customer to see it works, then quick back to
the vault. Intel has been sending out single Pentiums by messenger
to less favored customers and demanding the things back again once
they were tested in the prototype boxes. Intel is investing a huge
amount of money in Pentium. At the height of its production it will
have spent $5 billion on Pentium, a figure it's already half way
through. Comparatively it spent $100 million on the 386 and $1
billion on the 486. The Pentium P6 follow-on, which starts Intel's
break with its vaunted x86 compatibility, will absorb an even
greater sums than Pentium.
PENTIUM FINALLY PRICED; SLEW OF PRODUCTS PROMISED
Pentium was finally priced last week at $878 for the 60MHz and $965
for the 66MHz in quantities of 1,000. Compaq, Advanced Logic
Research, NCR, Unisys, AST Research, Tricord Systems, Dell, ICL,
Zenith, Siemens Nixdorf and Hewlett-Packard all announced product.
Interestingly little was made of NT perhaps because of this week's
NT announcement. HP abandoned some of its reserve about NT and
popped the Pentium-based NetServer LM/60 optimized for NT and priced
at $7,649 with 1GB of disk. It's still saying its non-strategic but
it's just a matter of time before they put it on their PA-RISC chip.
NCR thinks its got the fastest Pentium workstation doing 220 MIPS.
The symmetric two-way 3360 is meant as an NT workstation, especially
a software development platform, or a Unix client. Shipping in June
with two Pentiums, 32MB RAM, a 535MB drive, 600MB CD-ROM, Ethernet
or Token Ring adapter, 19-inch color display and preloaded NT will
sell between $18,000 and $20,000. Tricord's Pentium machines are
pledged to Sequent which is OEMing them exclusively for NT. AST came
up with the Premium SE P/60 server compatible with NT as well as
Solaris, Univel and OS/2. ICL will have the EISA TeamServer F5 with
16KB cache and 4GB in the third quarter beginning at $10,000 with
strategic support for NT. Along with Pentium-486 upgrades, Dell has
a first-generation Pentium 4560/XE server going for $5,550 for an
entry level with 8MB memory and 320MB hard, shipping in June. Last
week it fulfilled Steve Jobs' long-cherished wish and will sell
NeXtStep along side NT which it endorses this week.
THE LOWDOWN ON INTEL'S TOP SECRET "APPENDIX H"
Taking a page out of Microsoft's bochip frequency and size of
secondary cache. NeTpower has decided to use Acer's new PICA
R4000/4400 six-chip chipset designed specifically for NT PCs for its
initial machines. Later it will develop its own chipsets. Like other
NT merchants, NeTpower will have to meet ISV and developer
skepticism about whether the Windows NT APIs are really identical
for both Intel and MIPS machines. They're also going to have to
counter a lot of Unix FUD on this issue too. However, according to
NeTpower, all the current evidence suggests that yes, they are.
Meaning the developer doesn't really even have to port his software
from one to the other, simply recompile. The issue is an important
one to the whole MIPS NT contingent since the available software is
the only way any of them can leverage into volumes. NeTpower and its
ilk will also have to prove that NT RISC machines actually deliver
superior performance at lower cost than their competitors. In the
absence of any accepted benchmark standards, the evidence is largely
a mixture of NT and Windows 3.1. The facility will be available to
senior student, faculty and staff to let them experiment with NT.
Mortice Kern Systems Inc is shipping a beta release of its new MKS
Toolkit for Windows NT, including tools for command editing and
history, file processing and comparison, text manipulation and
sorting, a Windows Vi full-screen editor and the company's Make
software construction tools. MKS decided to break policy and ship
beta because NT is still a beta. The beta Tool the administration.
They say it can run an Oracle or Sybase database and has the
server's file and print services plus mail.
Rumour has it NT contains 4 million lines of code, 60k in Assembler.
Micro Focus has reinforced its five-year relationship with Microsoft
and will provide 32-bit COBOL for Windows NT including portability
across both Windows 3.x and NT. It will be available with NT. More
importantly perhaps it's planning on releasing an OLTP system to
migrate CICS apps to Microsoft platforms. Next month, in favor Micro
Focus technology, Microsoft is going to stop selling its own COBOL
Professional Development System which uses Micro Focus' compiler and
debugger anyway.
Star Technologies' says its multiprocessor, supplied by Amtec of
Switzerland and based on Corollary's symmetric multiprocessing
technology, was the only machine shipped to the Microsoft booth at
the Hanover Fair in March that was able to run NT straight from the
box. It was also used to run the Microsoft show network.
Novell has released the second beta of its NetWare client for
Windows NT free on CompuServe. It supports single log-in to the
NetWare network and NT desktop, links NT desktops to NetWare or LAN
Manager servers with a single adapter card and an upgraded SPX II
transport for better routing and performance in a WAN.
David Flack, the esteemed editor of McGraw-Hill's UnixWorld [ital]
magazine, has hung the tag "threatware" on NT.
Sun Microsystems, king of the Unix workstations, had better watch
its flank. Access Graphics, its key distributor, has been quietly
entertaining NT box peddlers.
SL Corporation is making its object-oriented programming tool SL-GMS
available for NT. It allows users to create, test and embed dynamic
real-time screen graphics into application software. It produces
realistic screen objects, not canned icons or graphs. The company
claims its stuff is "a true test of whether NT can really take over
the demanding high-end industrial applications formerly delivered
only under Unix and VMS." Preliminary test show NT's double
beffering is four times faster than OS/2 and comparable to most X
environments. SL's customers include Boeing, GE and Pacific
Telephone. +1 415 927-1724
CONGRUENT SUPPORTS X WINDOWS ON NT
Congruent Corporation reportedly has technology for NT to support X
Windows apps running on X terminals and workstations, creating a
multiuser configuration of X displays. Unix developers can use NT to
host X applications and companies can standardize on Windows NT and
still have the features and economy of X terminals. The resulting
application will not be optimized for NT. The New York firm will
provide NTNiX conversion tools for developers whose X applications
are hosted on Unix to migrate to NT. Congruent is developing NT
implementations of the X programming libraries and the X sample
applications including Xterm enhanced to take advantage of NT. The
conversion tools will support Motif.
AGE INTROS PC X SERVER FOR NT
Microsoft has left it to third parties to provide X connectivity for
NT so San Diego-based AGE Logic has come up with some PC X server
software for it called Xoftware/32 for Windows NT. It adds 32-bit
X11R5 server capability to 386, 486 and Pentium-based NT system so
users can concurrently access and display Windows, NT and network-
based Unix apps on the same PC. AGE will reportedly be the only X
server at Microsoft's booth at Windows World. The nine-year-old X
Window System software house has added enhancements like CascadeX so
windows can be positioned in a Microsoft-like cascading format or
the standard X Window System geometry format and the Color Map
Reservation System to optionally override the standard X color map
rountine and run the NT color map instead for clarity and
consistency. The stuff will sell for $495 single user when NT ships.
AGE is prepared to ship to NT's March Beta sites under an Early-
Start Program it invoked for the duration. For $995, AGE will
provide three pre-released copies of its software, priority
technical support and free upgrades.
NEC'S NT-ON-RISC BOXES INCLUDE LAPTOPS
You've got to give NEC credit for chutzpah. Back months ago, it sold
66MHz 486DX2 NT Evaluators to a bunch of Fortune 500 accounts
preloaded with the dicey Windows NT October Beta. Microsoft insisted
on restricting the number to no more than 25 machines and none were
to see a distribution channel. NEC says they're all still in place
and expects them to be turned to actual mission-critical use with
the coming of SQL Server later this year. NEC wants to make a big
splash at Windows World believing that the Unix market and the NT
market are one and the same. Although it hasn't decided yet, NEC may
sell NT on both Intel and MIPS boxes. However, its emphasis is
clearly on MIPS, whose chips it makes. It will debut a family of
products ranging from an under $2,000 building block platform that
reportedly expands on the instant MIPS kit that MIPS Technologies is
peddling to OEMS through its recently created Open Design Center.
There will also be a complete MIPS R4000-based system that will run
only NT. A little endian system, NEC says there is no Unix for it.
NEC will position it as a high-end extension of its existing Intel
PC line and dub it a PowerMate Express to associate it with the
desktop. The box will cost around $4,000 and include built-in
networking, Ethernet, 16MB internal, CD-ROM, graphics and an ISA bus
(EISA is coming). NEC and Microsoft are co-developing a special non-
3D NT graphics accelerator that should be available in a month or
two. One of its surprises will be a MIPS R4000-based high-resolution
colour laptop that it just started shipping in Japan. The US arm
will have it at Comdex running Unix, which is the only thing it
currently has available for, but expects to make it an NT machine
this summer. The widget, which isn't battery-powered and has to be
run off the mains, weights 16 lbs and includes a standard 1280 x
1024 screen that measures just under 15 inches with 16MB internal,
450MB external and Ethernet. NEC likes to think of it as a super-
small workstation and will price it under $10,000. NEC intends
majoring on MIPS portables. Last week it was co-developing and
making a low-cost/low-power 64-bit R4200 chip with MIPS, previously
code named VRX, for use in battery-powered NT notebooks and embedded
apps. The 80MHz widget, to sample in late '93, is spec'd to consume
1.5 watts and deliver 55 SPECint92 and 30 SPECfp92.
NEC HAS SGI GRAPHICS ON NT BEFORE SGI
NEC says it's beaten MIPS owner Silicon Graphics Inc to the punch
and ported SGI's Microsoft-approved graphics library OpenGL to NEC's
MIPS-based NT machines which it reportedly did with the help of
third party Pellucid. SGI is biding its time working with Microsoft
putting OpenGL directly into a future release of NT. Because it's so
heavily graphic, SGI is stymied from throwing its own weight behind
NT until those libraries get in there. The Unix leadership, if
that's what the COSE combine is, appear to be gunning for OpenGL by
its very exclusion from the technologies it's picked to rally round.
A survey of a thousand attendees taken in March at Uniforum, the
flagship Unix convention, found that 37% believe NT will offer
benefits not yet found in Unix. It also indicated that the industry
has failed to explain the benefits of client/server technology
adequately. Key players have been struggling with the issue for
months but words fail them.
The first thrust in the joust between Microsoft and Unix is centered
oddly enough on how well Unix will be able to run Windows apps. Unix
has bowed to Microsoft's predominance by acknowledging the
importance of running these apps. It is now trying to cut Microsoft
down to manageable size by prying its fingers from control of the
Windows Application Programming Interface with the newly spawned
Public Windows Initiative pressure group. Led by Sun Microsystems
START-UP SEEKS TO LEVERAGE WINDOWS 3.X TO RUN UNIX
There's more than one way to skin a cat, according to one Unix
company. Silicon Valley start-up nQue Technologies Corporation is
porting SVR4.2 Unix to Windows 3.1 as a Windows app aiming to
leverage Microsoft's huge installed base against it. It calls its
OpenAgent technology "Unix with training wheels" and hopes to detour
any migration to NT over to Unix. Its technology, scheduled for beta
testing early in the third quarter, is the first integration of the
Unix and Windows operating systems on a single machine. Users will
benefit, the company says, by not having to wipe their disks clean
and reinstall their application to experiment with Unix as they will
with NT and the other Unixes. They will also get full use of all
their Windows 3.1 apps with no degraded performance, circumventing
the problems Windows-on-Unix emulators are having. nQue says native-
mode Unix programs will run at 94% of their potential. nQue expects
to OEM the technology as well as package it as a low-cost retail
product distributed on CD-ROM and capable of a quick 30-minute
install. It is hoping Unix System Laboratories, creators of Unix and
source of nQue's SVR4.2 license, will make it an install option for
SVR4.2 generally. The OpenAgent software will come initially in two
packages that nQue wants to retail for under $300 each: a two-user
base product called Destination and Connection which includes the
networking and multi-user sets. Other pieces to be added later would
include a development set, the Tuxedo transaction processor and the
Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE)
and Distributed Management Environment (DME). To run, nQue says
OpenAgent would need a 33MHz 386DX box with 16MB. A 33MHz 486DX with
at least 8MB would be better. The hard disk should be an 80MB IDE or
larger with a network install option. A 200MB SCSI is optimal.
Destination, the OpenAgent foundation piece, needs Windows 3.x and
MS-DOS 5.0. OpenAgent Connection may require Windows for Workgroups
to take advantage of its management interface or Windows 3.1's
follow-on, it is not certain yet.
The famed Microprocessor Report [ital] is branching out to cover
systems starting with the MicroSystems Forum, mate to the
Microprocessor Forum, to be held June 14-17 at the Fairmont Hotel in
San Jose, California. Among the topics is a comparison of systems
design using Pentium, MIPS or Alpha processors and a session on the
OS wars. +1 707 824-4004
OBJECTIVITY TO MOVE OBJECT-ORIENTED DB TO NT
Objectivity is slated to announce a Database Starter Kit for Windows
NT at Windows World this week where it will probably be the only
representative from the object database community. Apparently the
stuff will eventually allow NT developers to build object-oriented
apps that tie into databases that could be running on any of the
myriad Unix workstations the company already supports as well as VMS
under NFS. Objectivity claims to have the largest installed base of
any of these new-fangled object-oriented concerns and interestingly
enough DEC, that other NT adherent, sells its stuff as DEC Object
Database. A single-user version of Objectivity's NT kit should be
available in August for $2,995.
UNIX' KEY SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT SCHEME MOVES TO NT
Tivoli Systems Inc, whose object-oriented distributed systems
management scheme has been adopted by the Open Software Foundation,
Unix International and Sun Microsystems, the three keys to the Unix
kingdom, will announce this week that it will develop a version of
its product for Windows NT. It will also demostrate an early version
of the Tivoli Management Environment for Windows NT at Windows
World. Specifically it will show an NT-style Tivoli/Works, its core
application, running under Windows 3.1 on a 486 PC and managing
resources across NT and Unix. As with its Unix brother, the software
is meant to make it easier for systems administrators to manage,
configure, change, monitor and enforce security of NT systems across
large networks. It will also allow systems managers to manage NT and
Unix systems as well as Windows and DOS clients from a single
integrated systems-manager point-and-click desktop. The environment
for Windows NT will come in stages starting in late 1993 with an
advanced developers' toolkit followed by the gamut of Tivoli
applications beginning in early 1994. Tivoli envisions third parties
supplying additional apps. The environment is to run on the range of
PC and workstation platforms supported by NT and be targeted at
computing environments where corporate databases, applications and
services are distributed across many decentralized computers and
shared by many users. Tivoli's architecture is one of the few things
the Unix industry seemed to be able to agree on during the long
years of the Unix wars. The company recently offered to fill the
systems management gap left to be filled by COSE, the anti-NT
gathering of Unix forces. It volunteered to create a common
applications programming interface (API) based on its object-
oriented framework and submit it gratis to X/Open, the standards
body, as part of the COSE standard. COSE has yet to respond.
One thing Windows NT desparately needs is its own series of native
benchmarks. Vendors are currently gerryriging tests, leaning heavily
on the old SpecMarks of the Unix workstation crowd even though
they're not even ported to NT. Unfortunately the stuff just doesn't
apply. Neither does MIPS, Dhrystones, PC benchmarks, TP or
scientific calculations. Newcomer NeTpower says it's getting ready
to talk to fellow vendors about a testing scheme. Silicon Graphics
meanwhile says it's working on a proprietary set of benchmarks that
it'll share with others in the fall.
Throwing cold water on NT's chances, InfoCorp forecasts that by the
end of 1997 it will have only 12% of the server shipments and 11% of
the server revenue versus Unix at 64% and 62% respectively. It also
predicts NT will grow in revenue at the expense of proprietary
systems and other network operating systems like OS/2.
Windows NT's 32-bit SQL Server, co-developed by Sybase and due out
in the third quarter, is now in its second beta at a reported 1,500
sites, half of them supposedly corporates. A new $495 jump-start
developers' kit has been released with improved support for
transaction processing, data integrity rules and the ability to
execute remotely stored procedures. The SQL Server is supposed to
interoperate with all existing SQL Server products and apps though
it adds support for symmetrical multiprocessors, integrated security
and distributed management and backup.
Like everybody else these days, Taligent, the IBM/Apple joint
venture, is targeting the high-volume desktop with next-generation
object-oriented operating system-in-the-making designed to work in
distributed client/server environments.
Compaq believes there are three OEMs strategic to Microsoft's NT
aspirations: itself for volume, DEC and Sequent.
COMPAQ LAYS LOW UNTIL SEPTEMBER;
SOFTENS UP LARGE ACCOUNTS
Compaq Computer Corporation, probably the lynchpin to Windows NT
volumes, will be keeping a low profile at Comdex Spring, a forum
that has never been its meat. Besides, it's reportedly got its hands
full insuring the Pentium servers it announced last week run 486s to
tide them over the chip shortage. It's not just plug and play you
know. Compaq will however host a breakfast at Comdex for special end
user accounts like Pepsi and Coke and has Microsoft senior VP Paul
Maritz coming to chat them up on the wonders of NT. Compaq estimates
that there have been about 2,000 NT-on-Compaq sites among the
worldwide Fortune 500 the last few months looking the stuff over.
Compaq's big move with NT is scheduled to start in September when it
rolls out a bunch of new machines: a uniprocessor, a dual processor
and a 4-way meant to run on Pentiums. Compaq avers the stuff will
run SCO Unix, maybe UnixWare on the uniprocessor and a lot of Novell
NetWare in addition to NT. However ISVs familiar with the machines
say they'll be pretty much bundled with NT. In September it'll also
bundle the stuff with a couple of Pentium desktop clients fitted
with high-end graphics. Compaq is currently working on its own
version of NT gussied up with all the device drivers it needs. Then
it can put out its own CD of Windows NT as in expects to do in
September. Until it has that straightened up it can't seriously
market the software. It will also be providing its own fault
prevention Compaq Inside system management tool to watch over how
memory and disk drives are doing.
SPIN-OFF CLAIMS TO MAKE NT & UNIX SOURCE-COMPATIBLE
University of Utah spin-out Hippo Software Inc in Salt Lake City
says it has a $240 package that runs on Windows NT-based PCs that
allows developers to write programs that are source code-compatible
with both NT and Unix. The package, called Hippix and developed at
the university's Center for Software Science, includes Unix commands
and libraries that Hippo maintains will let Unix users cost-
effectively integrate PCs into their Unix networks by giving them
identical tools for both platforms. Hippix also runs on OS/2
platforms and Hippo reportedly has an installed base of OS/2
customers. The Hippix command set includes a hundred utilities
implementing most of the IEEE Posix 1003.2 and 1003.2a draft
standards like the general utilities awk, the pattern-directed
scanning and processing language, grep, the pattern file searcher,
sh, the interactive scripting language, and vi, the text editor. It
also provides programming utilities such as lex, yacc and rcs which
simplify software development. Hippo says support for these commands
on PCs increases the ease of multi-platform integration and systems
admin. The Hippix programming library supports 90% of the functions
of the Posix 1003.1 System API. All Hippix utilities are implemented
using functions in the programming library. Developers can use 150
functions to implement non-graphical sections of their apps and what
results is reportedly source-compatible with Posix-compliant Unix
systems. The company intends making a beta version of the NT
software available next month. The commands can be purchased
separately for $180. Hippix is Hippo's first product and it is
currently trying to figure out its target market.
MIPS TRIES ANOTHER ROUTE TO SELL NT-ON-MIPS
MIPS Technologies Inc, desperate to commoditize its silicon, is
supposed to turn up at Windows World with thousands of buttons that
read, "NT is too important to entrust to Intel." It's also going to
turn up with a sealed agreement with AMI, the PC BIOS people, to
sell, support and later develop the instant NT-on-MIPS kits that
MIPS through its recently established Open Design Center has been
trying to peddle to kickstart PC makers and get them to build low-
cost NT boxes out of MIPS chips rather then Intel parts. MIPS
figures vendors would rather buy from a neutral and it must get them
buying. It can't expect its handful of Unix vendors to account for
any real volumes (they currently absorb about 60,000 chips), leaving
NT as MIPS' only path to viability outside of embedded applications.
So far it's only attracted Acer, little Deskstation Technology and
the incestuous start-up NeTpower. MIPS has six designs in all
ranging from a blueprint for building a $1,500 box that MIPS claims
will offer close to, if not better than, Pentium performance up to
an $8,000 symmetric multiprocessor that does 250 SPECmarks. Only one
design is immediately available and that one derives from the old
ARCsystem of ACE Initiative days. It's actually an Acer America
layout that been modified and rechristened the riscWorkstation/EISA,
a plan for building a 64-bit R4000 sub-$5,000 NT machine. That's
apparently the one AMI will start with. There are supposed to be
kits for a under-$3,000 R4000 machine built solely out of PC parts,
an under-$2,500 AT-bus box and a $1,500 portable (see CSN's beta
issue). NeTpower, the new NT-on-MIPS hardware vendor (see page x),
turned its nose up at MIPS' instant NT kits. NeTpower termed them a
kluge and claimed MIPS sacrificed quality when it decided to use a
IDT-built translator chip that changes the MIPS bus to a 486 bus.
It's opted to use the new NT-specific PICA chipset also from Acer
that includes a high-speed 64-bit local bus to accelerate graphics
and networking. Acer will be trying to license the bus to the PC
industry.
DEC won't make the first production release of Windows NT. The NT
CD-ROM contains code for Intel and MIPS. DEC's been doing the NT
port to Alpha itself and got started late. Its NT Windows and DOS
emulation is also reportedly not finished. It says it expects to be
on the Microsoft CD after the first revision, in the fall or within
60 days of the Golden Version shipping take your pick. DEC has been
field shipping Alpha-ready Beta 2 since April.
Xhibition, the X Windows shindig June 7-11 at the San Jose
Convention Center in California, is making room for a Conference for
Windows NT Developers. It's also got the chief architects of the
anti-NT COSE movement coming to answer questions developers pose.
DEC and Microsoft will be there for NT.
DESKSTATION CLAIMS TO BE FIRST TO MARKET WITH NT-ON-MIPS
DeskStation Technology Inc, the little Lenexa, Kansas concern that
tried to become a MIPS workstation OEM during the ACE Initiative
days, has turned its attention to the NT arena as one of the three
companies it knows are pushing NT-on-MIPS boxes. Not counting NEC,
it claims it is the only one of the three with an open architecture,
reproaching Acer for proprietary video, memory, SCSI and Ethernet
and NeTpower for mimicking them. The first to market, it announced
in April the availability of boxes dubbed the Evolution Series whose
prices start at $3,995 for the 50MHz R4000-based rPC/40. It has an
entry-level companion piece in the $4,995 50MHz R4400-based rPC/44
with twice the primary cache of the former. The boxes are built
around a standard AT-sized motherboard with an EISA bus and are
being positioned as high-end PCs, combining RISC technology with
standard PC components for superior price/performance over Intel
machines. DeskStation claims Acer, on the other hand, is pitching
its boxes in the higher priced less generic workstation mode. Base
DeskStation configurations include 16MB main memory, a 14-inch 1024
x 768 non-interlaced monitor, AT keyboard, mouse, 512K write-through
cache, 3.5-inch floppy, S3 Super VGA adapter and 200MB drive in a
tower chassis. Other configurations are available with CD-ROMs,
expanded main memory, larger monitors and higher capacity SCSI
drives priced at thousand-dollar increments up to $10,000. The
company provides an "ARCS-BIOS," 30,000 lines of code that support
the R4x00 processors and NT in combination with standard AT
hardware. DeskStation says it can also hike the processors'
secondary cache to 512Kbyte to enhance performance. DeskStation
expects to put 1,500 to 2,500 machines out itself as a PC provider
the first year. It says it does not need to achieve big volumes
because of the size and location of the company. It believes the
Dell mail-order scheme can be revisited for its NT-on-MIPS offering.
It also expects to be working with value-added resellers. It figures
its first customers will be ISVs and corporate developers writing
applications for NT and says its machines are good for compute-
intensive apps such as desktop publishing, CAD/CAE, data processing
and SQL servers. The company anticipates being on the 1993 GSA
schedule. DeskStation will also seek to license its motherboard
technology to OEMs. Under an agreement with Integrated Device
Technology Inc, one of MIPS' silicon makers, and OPTi Inc, the three
companies are collaborating to provide an IDT R4000PC RISC NT chip
set combined with the industry standard OPTi 486EISAWB chip set.
DeskStation's management team includes president Don Peterson, an
alumnus of Advanced Micro Devices, and vice-president of technology
and development Blaise Fanning, an ex-DEC design engineer from the
VAX and High Performance Workstation Group who architected the
Evolution Series and its "next-generation" BIOS.
NUTCRACKER PROMISES TO SIMPLIFY UNIX-TO-NT PORTS;
DataFocus thinks it's cracked the code on moving Unix apps to
Windows NT. The company, a wholly owned $3 million Virginia
subsidiary of publicly held Convergent Solutions Inc, describes its
NuTcracker technology as the opposite of Wind/U, the Bristol
Technology Windows-on-Unix scheme that may feature in Microsoft's
moves to counter WABI. (WABI is the just announced SunSelect product
for running Windows applications on Unix that is expected to receive
widespread industry support as a cudgel against Microsoft's
perceived monopolistic ambitions.) NuTcracker will reportedly allow
Unix source code to run on NT's Win32 APIs. DataFocus believes the
technology may be of interest to COSE, the anti-NT industry
coalition kicked off in March by Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, the
Santa Cruz Operation and Unix System Labs. It is reportedly
scheduled to meet soon with two unidentified COSE companies.
DataFocus was the first company ever to move the POSIX interface to
a non-Unix operating system, in this case Unisys' CTOS. It has been
working on NuTcracker since the beginning of the year. Although the
product is still under development, DataFocus has apparently had
some good results with a number of unidentified packages and expects
to make an announcement this week at Windows World with a sNT as in
expects to do in September. Until it has that straightened up it
can't seriously market the software. It will also be providing its
own fault prevention Compaq Inside system management tool to watch
over how memory and disk drives are doing.
SPIN-OFF CLAIMS TO MAKE NT & UNIX SOURCE-COMPATIBLE
University of Utah spin-out Hippo Software Inc in Salt Lake City
says it has a $240 package that runs on Windows NT-based PCs that
allows developers to write programs that are source code-compatible
with both NT and Unix. The package, called Hippix and developed at
the university's Center for Software Science, includes Unix commands
and libraries that Hippo maintains will let Unix users cost-
effectively integrate PCs into their Unix networks by giving them
identical tools for both platforms. Hippix also runs on OS/2
platforms and Hippo reportedly has an installed base of OS/2
customers. The Hippix command set includes a hundred utilities
implementing most of the IEEE Posix 1003.2 and 1003.2a draft
ISSUE 1
MICROSOFT MAY MAKE DEADLINE AFTERALL;
TELLS OEMs WINDOWS NT SHIPS JUNE 15
Microsoft has been telling key OEMs that it will start shipping both
the client and server portions of Windows NT 3.1 worldwide on
Tuesday June 15. The software is reportedly scheduled to be released
to manufacturing on Saturday June 5. The commitment comes admid
mounting press reports that NT, or at least the NT Advanced Server,
would seriously slip Microsoft's self-imposed June 30 delivery
deadline. OEMs said they felt 80% confident the June 15 schedule
would hold.
LIST PRICES SAID TO BE $495 & $2,995;
SIX-MONTH PROMO WILL CUT THEM TO $299 & $1,495
Microsoft has reportedly fixed list prices at $495 for the client
and $2,995 for the server. A special six-month promotion offer is
supposed to bring prices to $299 for the client and $1,495 for the
server. Microsoft is thought to be pricing against recent desktop
Unix entries such as SunSoft's Solaris-on-Intel and Univel's
UnixWare. Solaris x86 is due to ship May 29 at $795. Novell's Univel
joint venture halved its prices in March as a pre-emptive strike
against the threat of Windows NT. The UnixWare client-side Personal
Edition is now $250, the cheapest Unix on the block, and its
Application Server is now $1,300. There will doubtless be cheap NT
upgrades available to Windows and OS/2 users. Microsoft has
previously speculated that the software would be subject to almost
immediate street discounting but it can't let NT prices sink too low
without impacting Windows 3.1. OEMs themselves are expecting varied
discounts hinged on volumes. One said Microsoft would likely do most
of its OEM business at 80% off. Microsoft has been burning the
midnight oil attempting to get NT out on schedule, with staffers
putting in 70 and 80 hours weeks. Travel has been curtailed so
people could focus on the launch today in Atlanta and outsiders who
have visited Redmond over the last 11 years say they've never seen
the intensity level so high. As important as meeting the deadline
is, NT's robustness is believed to have been of greater concern.
Shoddy goods could damage Microsoft's chances of vaunting into the
enterprise. As confident of NT's quality as Microsoft's shipping
plans imply, it is still generally acknowledged that it will months
and months before the software is sufficiently hardened to run
mission-critical applications.
EX-MIPS CHIEF RESURRECTS ACE VISION;
STARTS BRAND NEW NT-ON-MIPS COMPUTER COMPANY
One-time architect of the ACE Initiative Bob Miller, erstwhile chief
of MIPS Computer Systems Inc and its successor MIPS Technologies
Inc, is bent on hammering out his initial vision. In February, he
left MIPS Technologies to start NeTpower Inc, a brand new hardware
maker dedicated to building Windows NT boxes based on MIPS' R4x00
RISC chips. The Sunnyvale, California-based fledgling is backed by a
first-round investment of around $6.1m from MIPS' owner Silicon
Graphics Inc and venture sources including Institutional Venture
Partners, the Mayfield Fund, New Enterprise Associates and Onset
Enterprise Associates. NeTpower expects the money to last until
early next year when it contemplates going for a second round that
it will attempt to minimize by virtue of the cash flow it should be
generating from selling its products. It figures if it needs much
more than that it might as well close up shop. NT will have failed.
If NT hits, however, NeTpower believes it will be doing a few
hundred million dollars worth of business in three to five years.
The 25-man company has collected what it regards as a star-studded
string of old Unix veterans to run the joint. Besides Miller, it's
got co-founder Edward Frank as VP of R&D, a Distinguished Engineer
at Sun Microsystems, architect of Sun's Sparcstation 10 desktop
multiprocessor and a principal in the creation of First Person Inc,
Sun's recently formed highly secretive consumer electronics
subsidiary. Then there's VP and chief architect Skip Stritter,
another co-founder, who also helped start MIPS and was there as VP,
development programs. In a previous life, Stritter had been
Motorola's chief architect on the 68000 microprocessor family.
NeTpower's also picked up sales VP Ralph Mele from MasPar Computer
Corporation where he had been VP, worldwide sales and support after
running SGI's North American Field Organization. It got its
marketing VP Linda Hargrove from HP's General Systems Division where
she had been worldwide marketing manager for the HP9000 Series 800
machines and it got its product marketing director John Novitsky
from Intel where he managed Pentium's product planning and technical
marketing teams. NeTpower expects to deliver its first three unnamed
turnkey machines in volume this fall: a sub-$5,000 entry-level R4000
desktop, a sub-$10,000 high-end R4400 desktop and a low-end sub-
$10,000 R4400 deskside server. The entrants presuppose a networked
client/server architecture. Next year, in what will be co-founder Ed
Frank's third implementation of a commercial symmetric
multiprocessor, it anticipates breaking into SMP. The boxes are
currently in external alpha sites where the company hopes to
validate some of the assumptions still swirling around NT and the
MIPS architecture such as whether a MIPS NT machine can hack it in
the Intel environment as a price/performance player. NeTpower
machines are meant to look, feel and smell like a PC. They fit in a
baby AT form factor and incorporate ISA expansion slots. The company
has turned its nose up at EISA as unnecessary and used its own high-
speed local bus. There are built-in SCSI and networking resources.
Its beta experience this summer will help NeTpower sort out exactly
how the machines should be configured. Stuff like the monitor,
standard RAM size (probably at least 16MB), and whether to make CDs
optional versus price. The NT market being akin to a continent in
formation, such seemingly obvious requirements are not at all that
obvious, making NeTpower a valuable case study. The entry client
machine will probably use a 50MHz R4000 MIPS chip and deliver around
60 Specmarks performance; the server will probably use a 75MHz R4400
and deliver around 90 SpecMarks. The box in between is currently
iffier about such things as chip frequency and size of secondary
cache. NeTpower has decided to use Acer's new PICA R4000/4400 six-
chip chipset designed specifically for NT PCs for its initial
machines. Later it will develop its own chipsets. Like other NT
merchants, NeTpower will have to meet ISV and developer skepticism
about whether
the Windows NT APIs are really identical for both Intel and MIPS
machines. They're also going to have to counter a lot of Unix FUD on
this issue too. However, according to NeTpower, all the current
evidence suggests that yes, they are. Meaning the developer doesn't
really even have to port his software from one to the other, simply
recompile. The issue is an important one to the whole MIPS NT
contingent since the available software is the only way any of them
can leverage into volumes. NeTpower and its ilk will also have to
prove that NT RISC machines actually deliver superior performance at
lower cost than their competitors. In the absence of any accepted
benchmark standards, the evidence is largely anecdotal. For
instance, NeTpower believes its R4000 machine can outperform a 66MHz
489DX2 by a factor of two on integer and a factor of seven on
floating point. Such claims need validation.
NeTpower figures to add considerable value to the standard MIPS NT
machine and it figures it will get a lot of the technology it adds
such as interconnect, NFS and tuned servers by using its machines
itself internally. As a result, it's doing what almost everyone says
can't be done or shouldn't be done with a 1.0 operating system
release: It's running the company on it. Everything mission-critical
from manufacturing and financial to marketing and sales,
engineering, chip design, board design and E-mail is reportedly
running on NT and as NeTpower's own machines come on-line it's
phasing out the 486DX2 boxes it started with. Its own internal needs
accounts for its port of NFS to Windows NT, for instance. ItNT:
ISSUE 1
MICROSOFT MAY MAKE DEADLINE AFTERALL;
TELLS OEMs WINDOWS NT SHIPS JUNE 15
Microsoft has been telling key OEMs that it will start shipping both
the client and server portions of Windows NT 3.1 worldwide on
Tuesday June 15. The software is reportedly scheduled to be released
to manufacturing on Saturday June 5. The commitment comes admid
mounting press reports that NT, or at least the NT Advanced Server,
would seriously slip Microsoft's self-imposed June 30 delivery
deadline. OEMs said they felt 80% confident the June 15 schedule
would hold.
LIST PRICES SAID TO BE $495 & $2,995;
SIX-MONTH PROMO WILL CUT THEM TO $299 & $1,495
Microsoft has reportedly fixed list prices at $495 for the client
and $2,995 for the server. A special six-month promotion offer is
supposed to bring prices to $299 for the client and $1,495 for the
server. Microsoft is thought to be pricing against recent desktop
Unix entries such as SunSoft's Solaris-on-Intel and Univel's
UnixWare. Solaris x86 is due to ship May 29
avvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvnning a mixture of NT and Windows 3.1. The
facility will be available to senior student, faculty and staff to
let them experiment with NT.
Mortice Kern Systems Inc is shipping a beta release of its new MKS
Toolkit for Windows NT, including tools for command editing and
history, file processing and comparison, text manipulation and
sorting, a Windows Vi full-screen editor and the company's Make
software construction tools. MKS decided to break policy and ship
beta because NT is still a beta. The beta Toolkit is $99 and will be
upgradable to the general release for another $99 after NT ships. +1
519 884-2251
YA CAN'T CALL IT NT
Windows isn't the only trademark Microsoft is having trouble
getting. NT is also a no-go. Northern Telecom claims that it is NT
and has told Microsoft it can't use the designation. That's why
Redmond is trying to squeek by using Windows NT instead and stamp
out all references solely to NT. The situation is complicated by the
fact that Northern Telecom is a big Microsoft customer. It could be
worse. Windows NT seems to have greater strategic implications,
however accidental.
Publisher's Statement
It is the purpose of this newsletter to supply the industry and its
users with strategic information about Windows NT. Like its sister
publication, the Unix weekly, Unigram.X, it is pledged to fact and
fair comment. Good honest gossip, the lifeblood of the computer
business, also has its place. Like Unigram, its format will be
concise and pointed, its style a touch brash and, with any luck, a
bit controversial. Its object will be to break the stories that give
its readers the real inside track. Microsoft is unquestionably a
force to be reckoned with. NT, if it lives up to only half of its
billing, clearly deserves a forum of its own for the benefit of
competitor and adherent alike. With its experience of 32-bit
operating systems and knowledge of the political landscape, ClieNT
Server News aims to be that forum. --MO'G
Microsoft said that because of its own difficulties with the
designation NT (see page x) Ziff-Davis, publishers of PC Week
[ital], will have to withdraw those intent-to-use trademark
applications it filed with the US Trademark Office in September of
last year for the names NT Sources, NT Week, NT Computing, NT
Shopper, NT User and NT Magazine.
???????????Sequent, which is putting Windows NT up on symmetric
multiprocessors, says there will actually be three versions of the
operating system: the client, an inexpensive four-processor retail
model of the Advanced Server and a 16-processor OEM-only version of
the Advanced Server which it's using. Bill Gates, by the way, bought
7% of Sequent back in March.
Rumour has it NT contains 4 million lines of code, 60k in Assembler.
Star Technologies' says its multiprocessor, supplied by Amtec of
Switzerland and based on Corollary's symmetric multiprocessing
technology, was the only machine shipped to the Microsoft booth at
the Hanover Fair in March that was able to run NT straight from the
box. It was also used to run the Microsoft show network.
Novell has released the second beta of its NetWare client for
Windows NT free on CompuServe. It supports single log-in to the
NetWare network and NT desktop, links NT desktops to NetWare or LAN
Manager servers with a single adapter card and an upgraded SPX II
transport for better routing and performance in a WAN.
David Flack, the esteemed editor of McGraw-Hill's UnixWorld [ital]
magazine, has hung the tag "threatware" on NT.
Sun Microsystems, king of the Unix workstations, had better watch
its flank. Access Graphics, its key distributor, has been quietly
entertaining NT box peddlers.
CONGRUENT SUPPORTS X WINDOWS ON NT
Congruent Corporation reportedly has technology for NT to support X
Windows apps running on X terminals and workstations, creating a
multiuser configuration of X displays. Unix developers can use NT to
host X applications and companies can standardize on Windows NT and
still have the features and economy of X terminals. The resulting
application will not be optim_
Beta'd As BillyGram
The Independent Observer of Microsoft, Windows NT and Other
Phenomena
New York, May 24-28 1993
Premier Issue
ClieNT Server NEWS is published weekly by G-2 Computer Intelligence
Inc, Glen Head, New York
Publisher: Maureen O'Gara.
Technical Editor: Geof Wheelwright.
Sales: Shannon Shupack.
Circulation: Vanessa Stephens.
UK Publisher: Unigram Products Ltd
12 Sutton Row 4th Floor London W1V 5FH
Telephone: +44 (0)71 867 9880 Fax: +44 (0)71 439 1105
E-mail: unigram!george@uunet.UU.NET
(c) Copyright 1993 G-2 Computer Intelligence Inc.
NO PORTION OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED, STORED IN A
RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS,
ELECTRONIC, MECHANICAL, PHOTOCOPYING, RECORDING OR OTHERWISE WITHOUT
PRIOR PERMISSION OF G-2 COMPUTER INTELLIGENCE INC.
HEADLINES
-------------------------
New York, May 24-28 1993
Premier Issue
SUBJECT TO CHANGE, NT MAY MAKE DEADLINE
OEMs TOLD IT SHIPS JUNE 15
Microsoft has been telling key OEMs that it will start shipping both
the client and server portions of Windows NT 3.1 to resellers
worldwide on Tuesday June 15. The software is reportedly scheduled
to be released to manufacturing on Saturday June 5. The commitment
comes amid mounting press reports that NT, or at least the NT
Advanced Server, would seriously slip Microsoft's self-imposed June
30 delivery deadline. OEMs said they felt 80% confident the June 15
schedule would hold. So, it seems, does Microsoft. Microsoft said
last week it would need to meet the June 15 reseller ship date to
meet its June 30 deadline for general availability. It also said
that all it's doing now is trying to get NT to the lowest possible
bug count, measured against performance, and ship the stuff even
though contigents inside the company want it tweaked further. Having
reportedly showed no red flags yet, the debugging could turn up
serious enough flaws to hold up production.
For that reason Microsoft last week was expecting its chairman Bill Gates to be
conservative in his Windows World announcement of the product this
week and say that the client could slip 60 days and the server 90
days though it is still targeted to make deadline.
The company believes such a forecast is a worst-case projection and any slippage
is more likely to be only a few days or weeks. However, the
situation is reportedly so fluid it changes by the moment. Hence
Microsoft officials can maintain there is no firm date for shipment.
Depending on NT's status the weekend of May 22-23, Microsoft said
Gates and VP Paul Maritz, who will preside over the NT press
conference Monday May 24, could decide to be more optimistic and go
for broke. Significant performance gains have reportedly been made
since the March Beta which has now gone through many updates and can
no longer be considered representative of the product, Microsoft
says. If delivery is delayed Microsoft can rationalize availability
and point to the 80,000 betas it now says are in the field. Anybody
can buy a $69 Developers' Kit and get the system. The issue is
performance. It says customers are demanding a relatively hardened
product rather than a quick release to full deployment. However it's
still under considerable pressure to deliver.
PRICES ARE $495 & $2,995;
PROMOS COULD MAKE IT $295 & $1,495
Microsoft has fixed list prices at $495 for the client and $2,995
for the server. Six-month promotions are supposed to bring prices to
$295 for the client for upgrades to OS/2 and Windows 3.x and $1,495
for the server. It is also expected to price SNA and SQL Server,
both due Q3. Microsoft is thought to be pricing against recent
desktop Unix entries such as SunSoft's Solaris-on-Intel and Univel's
UnixWare. Solaris x86 is due to ship May 29 at $795. Novell's Univel
joint venture halved its prices in March as a pre-emptive strike
against the threat of Windows NT. The UnixWare client-side Personal
Edition is now $250, the cheapest Unix on the block, and its
Application Server is now $1,300. Microsoft has previously
speculated that the software would be subject to almost immediate
street discounting but it can't let NT prices sink too low without
impacting Windows 3.1. Resellers are supposed to enforce the $295
price. OEMs themselves are expecting varied discounts hinged on
volumes. One said Microsoft would likely do most of its OEM business
at 80% off. Microsoft has been burning the midnight oil attempting
to get NT out on schedule, with staffers putting in 70 and 80 hours
weeks. Travel has been curtailed so people could focus on the launch
today in Atlanta and outsiders who have visited Redmond over the
last 11 years say they've never seen the intensity level so high.
Even with all the work, it is still generally acknowledged that it
will months and months before the software is sufficiently hardened
to run mission-critical applications with aplomb. However, it will
reportedly be positioned as "the most powerful platform for
client/server computing" available. As a fall back, it will be
called "the best of three worlds: the workstation, the PC and the
network server."
MILLER RESURRECTS ACE VISION
WITH NEW NT-ON-MIPS COMPANY
One-time architect of the ACE Initiative Bob Miller, erstwhile chief
of MIPS Computer Systems Inc and its successor MIPS Technologies
Inc, is bent on hammering out his initial vision. In February, he
started NeTpower Inc, a brand new hardware maker dedicated to
building Windows NT boxes based on MIPS' R4x00 RISC chips. The
Sunnyvale, California-based fledgling is backed by a first-round
investment of around $6.1m from MIPS' owner Silicon Graphics Inc,
Stanford University and venture sources including Institutional
Venture Partners, the Mayfield Fund, New Enterprise Associates and
Onset Enterprise Associates. NeTpower expects the money to last
until early next year when it contemplates going for a second round
that it will attempt to minimize by virtue of the cash flow it
should be generating from selling its products. It figures if it
needs much more than that it might as well close up shop. NT will
have failed. If NT hits, however, NeTpower believes it will be doing
a few hundred million dollars worth of business in three to five
years. The 25-man company has collected what it regards as a star-
studded string of old Unix veterans to run the joint. Besides
Miller, it's got co-founder Edward Frank as VP of R&D, a
Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, architect of Sun's
Sparcstation 10 desktop multiprocessor and a principal in the
creation of First Person Inc, Sun's recently formed highly secretive
consumer electronics subsidiary. Then there's VP and chief architect
Skip Stritter, another co-founder, who also helped start MIPS and
was there as VP, development programs. In a previous life, Stritter
had been Motorola's chief architect on the 68000 microprocessor
family. NeTpower's also picked up sales VP Ralph Mele from MasPar
Computer Corporation where he had been VP, worldwide sales and
support after running SGI's North American Field Organization. It
got its marketing VP Linda Hargrove from HP's General Systems
Division where she had been worldwide marketing manager for the
HP9000 Series 800 machines and it got its product marketing director
John Novitsky from Intel where he managed Pentium's product planning
and technical marketing teams. NeTpower expects to deliver its first
three unnamed turnkey machines in volume this fall: a sub-$5,000
entry-level R4000 desktop, a sub-$10,000 high-end R4400 desktop and
a low-end sub-$10,000 R4400 deskside server. The entrants presuppose
a networked client/server architecture. Next year, in what will be
co-founder Ed Frank's third implementation of a commercial symmetric
multiprocessor, it anticipates breaking into SMP. The boxes are
currently in external alpha sites where the company hopes to
validate some of the assumptions still swirling around NT and the
MIPS architecture such as whether a MIPS NT machine can hack it in
the Intel environment as a price/performance player. NeTpower
machines are meant to look, feel and smell like a PC. They fit in a
baby AT form factor and incorporate ISA expansion slots. The company
has turned its nose up at EISA as unnecessary and used its own high-
speed local bus. There are built-in SCSI and networking resources.
Its beta experience this summer will help NeTpower sort out exactly
how the machines should be configured. Stuff like the monitor,
standard RAM size (probably at least 16MB), and whether to make CDs
optional versus price. The NT market being akin to a continent in
formation, such seemingly obvious requirements are not at all that
obvious, making NeTpower a valuable case study. The entry client
machine will probably use a 50MHz R4000 MIPS chip and deliver around
60 Specmarks performance; the server will probably use a 75MHz R4400
and deliver around 90 SpecMarks. The box in between is currently
iffier about such things as chip frequency and size of secondary
cache. NeTpower has decided to use Acer's new PICA R4000/4400 six-
chip chipset designed specifically for NT PCs for its initial
machines. Later it will develop its own chipsets. Like other NT
merchants, NeTpower will have to meet ISV and developer skepticism
about whether the Windows NT APIs are really identical for both
Intel and MIPS machines. They're also going to have to counter a lot
of Unix FUD on this issue too. However, according to NeTpower, all
the current evidence suggests that yes, they are. Meaning the
developer doesn't really even have to port his software from one to
the other, simply recompile. The issue is an important one to the
whole MIPS NT contingent since the available software is the only
way any of them can leverage into volumes. NeTpower and its ilk will
also have to prove that NT RISC machines actually deliver superior
performance at lower cost than their competitors. In the absence of
any accepted benchmark standards, the evidence is largely anecdotal.
For instance, NeTpower believes its R4000 machine can outperform a
66MHz 489DX2 by a factor of two on integer and a factor of seven on
floating point. Such claims need validation.
NeTpower figures to add considerable value to the standard MIPS NT
machine and it figures it will get a lot of the technology it adds
such as interconnect, NFS and tuned servers by using its machines
itself internally. As a result, it's doing what almost everyone says
can't be done or shouldn't be done with a 1.0 operating system
release: It's running the company on it. Everything mission-critical
from manufacturing and financial to marketing and sales,
engineering, chip design, board design and E-mail is reportedly
running on NT and as NeTpower's own machines come on-line it's
phasing out the 486DX2 boxes it started with. Its own internal needs
account for its port of NFS to Windows NT, for instance. It will
also probably provide NT with additional TCP/IP services. The
company expects to license these kinds of systems level improvements
to other NT OEMs, ISVs and Microsoft itself. Other value-adds will
focus on graphics and ease of use. SGI, an investor, is reportedly
interested in NeTpower as an opportunity to get its graphics
technology into the high-end PC space. NeTpower will work on 3D
capabilities and full-motion video. And although the product isn't
ready yet it's working on an auto-config feature that will
automatically install all the peripherals that will be used.
NeTpower plans on tapping three distribution channels. It will begin
with direct sales to Fortune 500 accounts through its offices in
Boston, Los Angeles, Dallas and New York. These will be backed by a
telesales unit mostly focused on fulfilling the demand prompted by
the direct sales people. Next year it will seek out VARs. It's
delaying third-party involvement because the NT infrastructure
probably won't support VARs making money this year. The NT market
needs to develop the software and third-party hardware that the
coming months should bring. Although initial units will go mostly to
ISVs, NeTpower estimates its markets lay not only with software
developers, but with the financial analysts (where it reckons NT
should shine), all the various CAD niches and the technical
workstation crowd as well as client/server computing or general-
purpose corporare computing.
NT DAY ONE: WHAT HAPPENS NOW?
by Amy Wohl
Okay. So the NT cat is out of the bag. Has you life changed?
Probably not yet. But depending on what happens in the next six to
12 months your choice of computing platform (and your choices) may
change quite a bit.
Think of the operating system market as a kind of trade-off line
with NT as the newest alternative. Of course, there are actually
dozens of operating systems, but if you're trying to buy a server
operating system starting now, there are really only three choices
that count:
* IBM's OS/2 2.1 (newly announced, just in time for Comdex, on May
18).
* Dozens of varieties of Unix.
* Microsoft's NT.
If you need to implement a mission-criticl application in 1993, it
is really unlikely that you'd turn to NT. That is not a comment on
the goodness of Microsoft's offering, but rather on the reality of
the nature of operating systems. Immature operating systems need
testing, breaking in and refining; that can't happen until after the
product is announced, shipped and in the hands of thousands of users
who will stretch it in unpredictable ways. This process can take
years; Microsoft's Windows product, for instance, took seven years
to become an overnight success. It isn't likely to take less than 12
months.
While many large users are likely to buy copies of NT to test and
experiment with, this will not represent commitment or volume sales,
only curiosity.
In this interim period, OS/2 and Unix get (one more time) another
chance. If OS/2 2.1 is particularly good and its follow-on product,
the Micro Kernel, ships on a timely basis, OS/2 will continue to
increase its bandwidth, particularly in the highly desirable large
accounts. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of large accounts have OS/2
projects in progress; once the coding starts, it is unlikely to be
interrupted by the announcement of a new operating system.
The news of increased convergence and harmony in the Unix community
also gives rise to the possibility that Unix will be seen as a good
server platform. This is enhanced by the beginnings of shipments of
the PowerPC chip, together with announcements of software vendors'
commitments to the platform. Too, Apple is porting all of the
Macintosh software, making it available of a number of RISC/Unix
environments, starting with Sun, IBM and HP. Again, large customers
can immediately satisfy their needs on an existing, tested and
robust environment that is continuing to grow.
Of course, nothing is likely to stop NT. Short of a major bug that
causes significant consternation for an extended time, it is
unlikely that Microsoft and NT will fail to become a major server
platform. But this will take time. NT will be announced with
substantial commitments of software, but this software must itself
be successfully ported (or written) and shipped. While IBM and the
Unix community can cross their figures and hope that NT stumbles,
giving them additional time to increase their installed base, it is
likely that NT will move substantially ahead by the 1995 timeframe
unless:
* The Taligent piece of the IBM/Apple strategy starts to
successfully surface and pulls substantial industry and customer
support; or
* Software vendors find that the NT market is slow to develop and
(as happened with OS/2) NT commitments don't necessarily mean NT
software in the market; or
* Microsoft shoots itself in the foot by shipping buggy software or
fails to provide adequate support for what is surely the most
complex product they have ever shipped. This, in itself, is probably
the worthy subject of another column.
Amy Wohl is a well-known speaker and writer, famous for her sharp
tongue and clear sight. She is the editor of The TrendsLetter, a
monthly newsletter which comments of computer technology for users.
IS PENTIUM HEXED?
Intel's much ballyhoo'd Pentium chip is bedeviled in more ways than
one. Not only won't it be delivered to OEMs in any significant
volumes until at least October, it's also reportedly crippled by
poor compiler technology, a recurring Intel shortcoming. The
compilers are so poor that a source intimate with the situation says
Microsoft is not going to recompile Windows NT for the thing. Not
being in the compiler business, Intel has sent the beta compiler to
third parties such as Unix System Laboratories, the Santa Cruz
Operation and compiler houses. It seems from these betas that there
are three ways of compiling: optimizing for the Pentium, for the 486
and somewhere in between. Other than skinny volumes, the compiler
issue may be one of the reasons why Microsoft says Pentium doesn't
count for much in its first-year NT sales projections. It's also
claimed to be one of the reasons why Microsoft is so interested in
the MIPS RISC chip. Some recall that Microsoft originally started
NT's development on an Intel I860 part and contend they threw it out
because the software was so bad. Others mitigate the point by noting
that the 860 was intended to be a numeric co-processor, not a
general-purpose chip designed to be programmable. Be that as it may,
Pentium is still confounded by its inability to ship in volume. Only
its pet customers are getting parts and even those are being doled
out sparingly. Its top five accounts, Compaq, Dell, NCR, NEC and
perhaps HP, have been promised only 2,000 to 3,000 Pentiums apiece
until at least the fall. The situation is so bad the industry has
taken to what it's calling "tea-bagging" it: Dipping the chip into a
box long enough for a customer to see it works, then quick back to
the vault. Intel has been sending out single Pentiums by messenger
to less favored customers and demanding the things back again once
they were tested in the prototype boxes. Intel is investing a huge
amount of money in Pentium. At the height of its production it will
have spent $5 billion on Pentium, a figure it's already half way
through. Comparatively it spent $100 million on the 386 and $1
billion on the 486. The Pentium P6 follow-on, which starts Intel's
break with its vaunted x86 compatibility, will absorb an even
greater sums than Pentium.
PENTIUM FINALLY PRICED; SLEW OF PRODUCTS PROMISED
Pentium was finally priced last week at $878 for the 60MHz and $965
for the 66MHz in quantities of 1,000. Compaq, Advanced Logic
Research, NCR, Unisys, AST Research, Tricord Systems, Dell, ICL,
Zenith, Siemens Nixdorf and Hewlett-Packard all announced product.
Interestingly little was made of NT perhaps because of this week's
NT announcement. HP abandoned some of its reserve about NT and
popped the Pentium-based NetServer LM/60 optimized for NT and priced
at $7,649 with 1GB of disk. It's still saying its non-strategic but
it's just a matter of time before they put it on their PA-RISC chip.
NCR thinks its got the fastest Pentium workstation doing 220 MIPS.
The symmetric two-way 3360 is meant as an NT workstation, especially
a software development platform, or a Unix client. Shipping in June
with two Pentiums, 32MB RAM, a 535MB drive, 600MB CD-ROM, Ethernet
or Token Ring adapter, 19-inch color display and preloaded NT will
sell between $18,000 and $20,000. Tricord's Pentium machines are
pledged to Sequent which is OEMing them exclusively for NT. AST came
up with the Premium SE P/60 server compatible with NT as well as
Solaris, Univel and OS/2. ICL will have the EISA TeamServer F5 with
16KB cache and 4GB in the third quarter beginning at $10,000 with
strategic support for NT. Along with Pentium-486 upgrades, Dell has
a first-generation Pentium 4560/XE server going for $5,550 for an
entry level with 8MB memory and 320MB hard, shipping in June. Last
week it fulfilled Steve Jobs' long-cherished wish and will sell
NeXtStep along side NT which it endorses this week.
THE LOWDOWN ON INTEL'S TOP SECRET "APPENDIX H"
Taking a page out of Microsoft's bochip frequency and size of
secondary cache. NeTpower has decided to use Acer's new PICA
R4000/4400 six-chip chipset designed specifically for NT PCs for its
initial machines. Later it will develop its own chipsets. Like other
NT merchants, NeTpower will have to meet ISV and developer
skepticism about whether the Windows NT APIs are really identical
for both Intel and MIPS machines. They're also going to have to
counter a lot of Unix FUD on this issue too. However, according to
NeTpower, all the current evidence suggests that yes, they are.
Meaning the developer doesn't really even have to port his software
from one to the other, simply recompile. The issue is an important
one to the whole MIPS NT contingent since the available software is
the only way any of them can leverage into volumes. NeTpower and its
ilk will also have to prove that NT RISC machines actually deliver
superior performance at lower cost than their competitors. In the
absence of any accepted benchmark standards, the evidence is largely
a mixture of NT and Windows 3.1. The facility will be available to
senior student, faculty and staff to let them experiment with NT.
Mortice Kern Systems Inc is shipping a beta release of its new MKS
Toolkit for Windows NT, including tools for command editing and
history, file processing and comparison, text manipulation and
sorting, a Windows Vi full-screen editor and the company's Make
software construction tools. MKS decided to break policy and ship
beta because NT is still a beta. The beta Tool the administration.
They say it can run an Oracle or Sybase database and has the
server's file and print services plus mail.
Rumour has it NT contains 4 million lines of code, 60k in Assembler.
Micro Focus has reinforced its five-year relationship with Microsoft
and will provide 32-bit COBOL for Windows NT including portability
across both Windows 3.x and NT. It will be available with NT. More
importantly perhaps it's planning on releasing an OLTP system to
migrate CICS apps to Microsoft platforms. Next month, in favor Micro
Focus technology, Microsoft is going to stop selling its own COBOL
Professional Development System which uses Micro Focus' compiler and
debugger anyway.
Star Technologies' says its multiprocessor, supplied by Amtec of
Switzerland and based on Corollary's symmetric multiprocessing
technology, was the only machine shipped to the Microsoft booth at
the Hanover Fair in March that was able to run NT straight from the
box. It was also used to run the Microsoft show network.
Novell has released the second beta of its NetWare client for
Windows NT free on CompuServe. It supports single log-in to the
NetWare network and NT desktop, links NT desktops to NetWare or LAN
Manager servers with a single adapter card and an upgraded SPX II
transport for better routing and performance in a WAN.
David Flack, the esteemed editor of McGraw-Hill's UnixWorld [ital]
magazine, has hung the tag "threatware" on NT.
Sun Microsystems, king of the Unix workstations, had better watch
its flank. Access Graphics, its key distributor, has been quietly
entertaining NT box peddlers.
SL Corporation is making its object-oriented programming tool SL-GMS
available for NT. It allows users to create, test and embed dynamic
real-time screen graphics into application software. It produces
realistic screen objects, not canned icons or graphs. The company
claims its stuff is "a true test of whether NT can really take over
the demanding high-end industrial applications formerly delivered
only under Unix and VMS." Preliminary test show NT's double
beffering is four times faster than OS/2 and comparable to most X
environments. SL's customers include Boeing, GE and Pacific
Telephone. +1 415 927-1724
CONGRUENT SUPPORTS X WINDOWS ON NT
Congruent Corporation reportedly has technology for NT to support X
Windows apps running on X terminals and workstations, creating a
multiuser configuration of X displays. Unix developers can use NT to
host X applications and companies can standardize on Windows NT and
still have the features and economy of X terminals. The resulting
application will not be optimized for NT. The New York firm will
provide NTNiX conversion tools for developers whose X applications
are hosted on Unix to migrate to NT. Congruent is developing NT
implementations of the X programming libraries and the X sample
applications including Xterm enhanced to take advantage of NT. The
conversion tools will support Motif.
AGE INTROS PC X SERVER FOR NT
Microsoft has left it to third parties to provide X connectivity for
NT so San Diego-based AGE Logic has come up with some PC X server
software for it called Xoftware/32 for Windows NT. It adds 32-bit
X11R5 server capability to 386, 486 and Pentium-based NT system so
users can concurrently access and display Windows, NT and network-
based Unix apps on the same PC. AGE will reportedly be the only X
server at Microsoft's booth at Windows World. The nine-year-old X
Window System software house has added enhancements like CascadeX so
windows can be positioned in a Microsoft-like cascading format or
the standard X Window System geometry format and the Color Map
Reservation System to optionally override the standard X color map
rountine and run the NT color map instead for clarity and
consistency. The stuff will sell for $495 single user when NT ships.
AGE is prepared to ship to NT's March Beta sites under an Early-
Start Program it invoked for the duration. For $995, AGE will
provide three pre-released copies of its software, priority
technical support and free upgrades.
NEC'S NT-ON-RISC BOXES INCLUDE LAPTOPS
You've got to give NEC credit for chutzpah. Back months ago, it sold
66MHz 486DX2 NT Evaluators to a bunch of Fortune 500 accounts
preloaded with the dicey Windows NT October Beta. Microsoft insisted
on restricting the number to no more than 25 machines and none were
to see a distribution channel. NEC says they're all still in place
and expects them to be turned to actual mission-critical use with
the coming of SQL Server later this year. NEC wants to make a big
splash at Windows World believing that the Unix market and the NT
market are one and the same. Although it hasn't decided yet, NEC may
sell NT on both Intel and MIPS boxes. However, its emphasis is
clearly on MIPS, whose chips it makes. It will debut a family of
products ranging from an under $2,000 building block platform that
reportedly expands on the instant MIPS kit that MIPS Technologies is
peddling to OEMS through its recently created Open Design Center.
There will also be a complete MIPS R4000-based system that will run
only NT. A little endian system, NEC says there is no Unix for it.
NEC will position it as a high-end extension of its existing Intel
PC line and dub it a PowerMate Express to associate it with the
desktop. The box will cost around $4,000 and include built-in
networking, Ethernet, 16MB internal, CD-ROM, graphics and an ISA bus
(EISA is coming). NEC and Microsoft are co-developing a special non-
3D NT graphics accelerator that should be available in a month or
two. One of its surprises will be a MIPS R4000-based high-resolution
colour laptop that it just started shipping in Japan. The US arm
will have it at Comdex running Unix, which is the only thing it
currently has available for, but expects to make it an NT machine
this summer. The widget, which isn't battery-powered and has to be
run off the mains, weights 16 lbs and includes a standard 1280 x
1024 screen that measures just under 15 inches with 16MB internal,
450MB external and Ethernet. NEC likes to think of it as a super-
small workstation and will price it under $10,000. NEC intends
majoring on MIPS portables. Last week it was co-developing and
making a low-cost/low-power 64-bit R4200 chip with MIPS, previously
code named VRX, for use in battery-powered NT notebooks and embedded
apps. The 80MHz widget, to sample in late '93, is spec'd to consume
1.5 watts and deliver 55 SPECint92 and 30 SPECfp92.
NEC HAS SGI GRAPHICS ON NT BEFORE SGI
NEC says it's beaten MIPS owner Silicon Graphics Inc to the punch
and ported SGI's Microsoft-approved graphics library OpenGL to NEC's
MIPS-based NT machines which it reportedly did with the help of
third party Pellucid. SGI is biding its time working with Microsoft
putting OpenGL directly into a future release of NT. Because it's so
heavily graphic, SGI is stymied from throwing its own weight behind
NT until those libraries get in there. The Unix leadership, if
that's what the COSE combine is, appear to be gunning for OpenGL by
its very exclusion from the technologies it's picked to rally round.
A survey of a thousand attendees taken in March at Uniforum, the
flagship Unix convention, found that 37% believe NT will offer
benefits not yet found in Unix. It also indicated that the industry
has failed to explain the benefits of client/server technology
adequately. Key players have been struggling with the issue for
months but words fail them.
The first thrust in the joust between Microsoft and Unix is centered
oddly enough on how well Unix will be able to run Windows apps. Unix
has bowed to Microsoft's predominance by acknowledging the
importance of running these apps. It is now trying to cut Microsoft
down to manageable size by prying its fingers from control of the
Windows Application Programming Interface with the newly spawned
Public Windows Initiative pressure group. Led by Sun Microsystems
START-UP SEEKS TO LEVERAGE WINDOWS 3.X TO RUN UNIX
There's more than one way to skin a cat, according to one Unix
company. Silicon Valley start-up nQue Technologies Corporation is
porting SVR4.2 Unix to Windows 3.1 as a Windows app aiming to
leverage Microsoft's huge installed base against it. It calls its
OpenAgent technology "Unix with training wheels" and hopes to detour
any migration to NT over to Unix. Its technology, scheduled for beta
testing early in the third quarter, is the first integration of the
Unix and Windows operating systems on a single machine. Users will
benefit, the company says, by not having to wipe their disks clean
and reinstall their application to experiment with Unix as they will
with NT and the other Unixes. They will also get full use of all
their Windows 3.1 apps with no degraded performance, circumventing
the problems Windows-on-Unix emulators are having. nQue says native-
mode Unix programs will run at 94% of their potential. nQue expects
to OEM the technology as well as package it as a low-cost retail
product distributed on CD-ROM and capable of a quick 30-minute
install. It is hoping Unix System Laboratories, creators of Unix and
source of nQue's SVR4.2 license, will make it an install option for
SVR4.2 generally. The OpenAgent software will come initially in two
packages that nQue wants to retail for under $300 each: a two-user
base product called Destination and Connection which includes the
networking and multi-user sets. Other pieces to be added later would
include a development set, the Tuxedo transaction processor and the
Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment (DCE)
and Distributed Management Environment (DME). To run, nQue says
OpenAgent would need a 33MHz 386DX box with 16MB. A 33MHz 486DX with
at least 8MB would be better. The hard disk should be an 80MB IDE or
larger with a network install option. A 200MB SCSI is optimal.
Destination, the OpenAgent foundation piece, needs Windows 3.x and
MS-DOS 5.0. OpenAgent Connection may require Windows for Workgroups
to take advantage of its management interface or Windows 3.1's
follow-on, it is not certain yet.
The famed Microprocessor Report [ital] is branching out to cover
systems starting with the MicroSystems Forum, mate to the
Microprocessor Forum, to be held June 14-17 at the Fairmont Hotel in
San Jose, California. Among the topics is a comparison of systems
design using Pentium, MIPS or Alpha processors and a session on the
OS wars. +1 707 824-4004
OBJECTIVITY TO MOVE OBJECT-ORIENTED DB TO NT
Objectivity is slated to announce a Database Starter Kit for Windows
NT at Windows World this week where it will probably be the only
representative from the object database community. Apparently the
stuff will eventually allow NT developers to build object-oriented
apps that tie into databases that could be running on any of the
myriad Unix workstations the company already supports as well as VMS
under NFS. Objectivity claims to have the largest installed base of
any of these new-fangled object-oriented concerns and interestingly
enough DEC, that other NT adherent, sells its stuff as DEC Object
Database. A single-user version of Objectivity's NT kit should be
available in August for $2,995.
UNIX' KEY SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT SCHEME MOVES TO NT
Tivoli Systems Inc, whose object-oriented distributed systems
management scheme has been adopted by the Open Software Foundation,
Unix International and Sun Microsystems, the three keys to the Unix
kingdom, will announce this week that it will develop a version of
its product for Windows NT. It will also demostrate an early version
of the Tivoli Management Environment for Windows NT at Windows
World. Specifically it will show an NT-style Tivoli/Works, its core
application, running under Windows 3.1 on a 486 PC and managing
resources across NT and Unix. As with its Unix brother, the software
is meant to make it easier for systems administrators to manage,
configure, change, monitor and enforce security of NT systems across
large networks. It will also allow systems managers to manage NT and
Unix systems as well as Windows and DOS clients from a single
integrated systems-manager point-and-click desktop. The environment
for Windows NT will come in stages starting in late 1993 with an
advanced developers' toolkit followed by the gamut of Tivoli
applications beginning in early 1994. Tivoli envisions third parties
supplying additional apps. The environment is to run on the range of
PC and workstation platforms supported by NT and be targeted at
computing environments where corporate databases, applications and
services are distributed across many decentralized computers and
shared by many users. Tivoli's architecture is one of the few things
the Unix industry seemed to be able to agree on during the long
years of the Unix wars. The company recently offered to fill the
systems management gap left to be filled by COSE, the anti-NT
gathering of Unix forces. It volunteered to create a common
applications programming interface (API) based on its object-
oriented framework and submit it gratis to X/Open, the standards
body, as part of the COSE standard. COSE has yet to respond.
One thing Windows NT desparately needs is its own series of native
benchmarks. Vendors are currently gerryriging tests, leaning heavily
on the old SpecMarks of the Unix workstation crowd even though
they're not even ported to NT. Unfortunately the stuff just doesn't
apply. Neither does MIPS, Dhrystones, PC benchmarks, TP or
scientific calculations. Newcomer NeTpower says it's getting ready
to talk to fellow vendors about a testing scheme. Silicon Graphics
meanwhile says it's working on a proprietary set of benchmarks that
it'll share with others in the fall.
Throwing cold water on NT's chances, InfoCorp forecasts that by the
end of 1997 it will have only 12% of the server shipments and 11% of
the server revenue versus Unix at 64% and 62% respectively. It also
predicts NT will grow in revenue at the expense of proprietary
systems and other network operating systems like OS/2.
Windows NT's 32-bit SQL Server, co-developed by Sybase and due out
in the third quarter, is now in its second beta at a reported 1,500
sites, half of them supposedly corporates. A new $495 jump-start
developers' kit has been released with improved support for
transaction processing, data integrity rules and the ability to
execute remotely stored procedures. The SQL Server is supposed to
interoperate with all existing SQL Server products and apps though
it adds support for symmetrical multiprocessors, integrated security
and distributed management and backup.
Like everybody else these days, Taligent, the IBM/Apple joint
venture, is targeting the high-volume desktop with next-generation
object-oriented operating system-in-the-making designed to work in
distributed client/server environments.
Compaq believes there are three OEMs strategic to Microsoft's NT
aspirations: itself for volume, DEC and Sequent.
COMPAQ LAYS LOW UNTIL SEPTEMBER;
SOFTENS UP LARGE ACCOUNTS
Compaq Computer Corporation, probably the lynchpin to Windows NT
volumes, will be keeping a low profile at Comdex Spring, a forum
that has never been its meat. Besides, it's reportedly got its hands
full insuring the Pentium servers it announced last week run 486s to
tide them over the chip shortage. It's not just plug and play you
know. Compaq will however host a breakfast at Comdex for special end
user accounts like Pepsi and Coke and has Microsoft senior VP Paul
Maritz coming to chat them up on the wonders of NT. Compaq estimates
that there have been about 2,000 NT-on-Compaq sites among the
worldwide Fortune 500 the last few months looking the stuff over.
Compaq's big move with NT is scheduled to start in September when it
rolls out a bunch of new machines: a uniprocessor, a dual processor
and a 4-way meant to run on Pentiums. Compaq avers the stuff will
run SCO Unix, maybe UnixWare on the uniprocessor and a lot of Novell
NetWare in addition to NT. However ISVs familiar with the machines
say they'll be pretty much bundled with NT. In September it'll also
bundle the stuff with a couple of Pentium desktop clients fitted
with high-end graphics. Compaq is currently working on its own
version of NT gussied up with all the device drivers it needs. Then
it can put out its own CD of Windows NT as in expects to do in
September. Until it has that straightened up it can't seriously
market the software. It will also be providing its own fault
prevention Compaq Inside system management tool to watch over how
memory and disk drives are doing.
SPIN-OFF CLAIMS TO MAKE NT & UNIX SOURCE-COMPATIBLE
University of Utah spin-out Hippo Software Inc in Salt Lake City
says it has a $240 package that runs on Windows NT-based PCs that
allows developers to write programs that are source code-compatible
with both NT and Unix. The package, called Hippix and developed at
the university's Center for Software Science, includes Unix commands
and libraries that Hippo maintains will let Unix users cost-
effectively integrate PCs into their Unix networks by giving them
identical tools for both platforms. Hippix also runs on OS/2
platforms and Hippo reportedly has an installed base of OS/2
customers. The Hippix command set includes a hundred utilities
implementing most of the IEEE Posix 1003.2 and 1003.2a draft
standards like the general utilities awk, the pattern-directed
scanning and processing language, grep, the pattern file searcher,
sh, the interactive scripting language, and vi, the text editor. It
also provides programming utilities such as lex, yacc and rcs which
simplify software development. Hippo says support for these commands
on PCs increases the ease of multi-platform integration and systems
admin. The Hippix programming library supports 90% of the functions
of the Posix 1003.1 System API. All Hippix utilities are implemented
using functions in the programming library. Developers can use 150
functions to implement non-graphical sections of their apps and what
results is reportedly source-compatible with Posix-compliant Unix
systems. The company intends making a beta version of the NT
software available next month. The commands can be purchased
separately for $180. Hippix is Hippo's first product and it is
currently trying to figure out its target market.
MIPS TRIES ANOTHER ROUTE TO SELL NT-ON-MIPS
MIPS Technologies Inc, desperate to commoditize its silicon, is
supposed to turn up at Windows World with thousands of buttons that
read, "NT is too important to entrust to Intel." It's also going to
turn up with a sealed agreement with AMI, the PC BIOS people, to
sell, support and later develop the instant NT-on-MIPS kits that
MIPS through its recently established Open Design Center has been
trying to peddle to kickstart PC makers and get them to build low-
cost NT boxes out of MIPS chips rather then Intel parts. MIPS
figures vendors would rather buy from a neutral and it must get them
buying. It can't expect its handful of Unix vendors to account for
any real volumes (they currently absorb about 60,000 chips), leaving
NT as MIPS' only path to viability outside of embedded applications.
So far it's only attracted Acer, little Deskstation Technology and
the incestuous start-up NeTpower. MIPS has six designs in all
ranging from a blueprint for building a $1,500 box that MIPS claims
will offer close to, if not better than, Pentium performance up to
an $8,000 symmetric multiprocessor that does 250 SPECmarks. Only one
design is immediately available and that one derives from the old
ARCsystem of ACE Initiative days. It's actually an Acer America
layout that been modified and rechristened the riscWorkstation/EISA,
a plan for building a 64-bit R4000 sub-$5,000 NT machine. That's
apparently the one AMI will start with. There are supposed to be
kits for a under-$3,000 R4000 machine built solely out of PC parts,
an under-$2,500 AT-bus box and a $1,500 portable (see CSN's beta
issue). NeTpower, the new NT-on-MIPS hardware vendor (see page x),
turned its nose up at MIPS' instant NT kits. NeTpower termed them a
kluge and claimed MIPS sacrificed quality when it decided to use a
IDT-built translator chip that changes the MIPS bus to a 486 bus.
It's opted to use the new NT-specific PICA chipset also from Acer
that includes a high-speed 64-bit local bus to accelerate graphics
and networking. Acer will be trying to license the bus to the PC
industry.
DEC won't make the first production release of Windows NT. The NT
CD-ROM contains code for Intel and MIPS. DEC's been doing the NT
port to Alpha itself and got started late. Its NT Windows and DOS
emulation is also reportedly not finished. It says it expects to be
on the Microsoft CD after the first revision, in the fall or within
60 days of the Golden Version shipping take your pick. DEC has been
field shipping Alpha-ready Beta 2 since April.
Xhibition, the X Windows shindig June 7-11 at the San Jose
Convention Center in California, is making room for a Conference for
Windows NT Developers. It's also got the chief architects of the
anti-NT COSE movement coming to answer questions developers pose.
DEC and Microsoft will be there for NT.
DESKSTATION CLAIMS TO BE FIRST TO MARKET WITH NT-ON-MIPS
DeskStation Technology Inc, the little Lenexa, Kansas concern that
tried to become a MIPS workstation OEM during the ACE Initiative
days, has turned its attention to the NT arena as one of the three
companies it knows are pushing NT-on-MIPS boxes. Not counting NEC,
it claims it is the only one of the three with an open architecture,
reproaching Acer for proprietary video, memory, SCSI and Ethernet
and NeTpower for mimicking them. The first to market, it announced
in April the availability of boxes dubbed the Evolution Series whose
prices start at $3,995 for the 50MHz R4000-based rPC/40. It has an
entry-level companion piece in the $4,995 50MHz R4400-based rPC/44
with twice the primary cache of the former. The boxes are built
around a standard AT-sized motherboard with an EISA bus and are
being positioned as high-end PCs, combining RISC technology with
standard PC components for superior price/performance over Intel
machines. DeskStation claims Acer, on the other hand, is pitching
its boxes in the higher priced less generic workstation mode. Base
DeskStation configurations include 16MB main memory, a 14-inch 1024
x 768 non-interlaced monitor, AT keyboard, mouse, 512K write-through
cache, 3.5-inch floppy, S3 Super VGA adapter and 200MB drive in a
tower chassis. Other configurations are available with CD-ROMs,
expanded main memory, larger monitors and higher capacity SCSI
drives priced at thousand-dollar increments up to $10,000. The
company provides an "ARCS-BIOS," 30,000 lines of code that support
the R4x00 processors and NT in combination with standard AT
hardware. DeskStation says it can also hike the processors'
secondary cache to 512Kbyte to enhance performance. DeskStation
expects to put 1,500 to 2,500 machines out itself as a PC provider
the first year. It says it does not need to achieve big volumes
because of the size and location of the company. It believes the
Dell mail-order scheme can be revisited for its NT-on-MIPS offering.
It also expects to be working with value-added resellers. It figures
its first customers will be ISVs and corporate developers writing
applications for NT and says its machines are good for compute-
intensive apps such as desktop publishing, CAD/CAE, data processing
and SQL servers. The company anticipates being on the 1993 GSA
schedule. DeskStation will also seek to license its motherboard
technology to OEMs. Under an agreement with Integrated Device
Technology Inc, one of MIPS' silicon makers, and OPTi Inc, the three
companies are collaborating to provide an IDT R4000PC RISC NT chip
set combined with the industry standard OPTi 486EISAWB chip set.
DeskStation's management team includes president Don Peterson, an
alumnus of Advanced Micro Devices, and vice-president of technology
and development Blaise Fanning, an ex-DEC design engineer from the
VAX and High Performance Workstation Group who architected the
Evolution Series and its "next-generation" BIOS.
NUTCRACKER PROMISES TO SIMPLIFY UNIX-TO-NT PORTS;
DataFocus thinks it's cracked the code on moving Unix apps to
Windows NT. The company, a wholly owned $3 million Virginia
subsidiary of publicly held Convergent Solutions Inc, describes its
NuTcracker technology as the opposite of Wind/U, the Bristol
Technology Windows-on-Unix scheme that may feature in Microsoft's
moves to counter WABI. (WABI is the just announced SunSelect product
for running Windows applications on Unix that is expected to receive
widespread industry support as a cudgel against Microsoft's
perceived monopolistic ambitions.) NuTcracker will reportedly allow
Unix source code to run on NT's Win32 APIs. DataFocus believes the
technology may be of interest to COSE, the anti-NT industry
coalition kicked off in March by Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, the
Santa Cruz Operation and Unix System Labs. It is reportedly
scheduled to meet soon with two unidentified COSE companies.
DataFocus was the first company ever to move the POSIX interface to
a non-Unix operating system, in this case Unisys' CTOS. It has been
working on NuTcracker since the beginning of the year. Although the
product is still under development, DataFocus has apparently had
some good results with a number of unidentified packages and expects
to make an announcement this week at Windows World with a sNT as in
expects to do in September. Until it has that straightened up it
can't seriously market the software. It will also be providing its
own fault prevention Compaq Inside system management tool to watch
over how memory and disk drives are doing.
SPIN-OFF CLAIMS TO MAKE NT & UNIX SOURCE-COMPATIBLE
University of Utah spin-out Hippo Software Inc in Salt Lake City
says it has a $240 package that runs on Windows NT-based PCs that
allows developers to write programs that are source code-compatible
with both NT and Unix. The package, called Hippix and developed at
the university's Center for Software Science, includes Unix commands
and libraries that Hippo maintains will let Unix users cost-
effectively integrate PCs into their Unix networks by giving them
identical tools for both platforms. Hippix also runs on OS/2
platforms and Hippo reportedly has an installed base of OS/2
customers. The Hippix command set includes a hundred utilities
implementing most of the IEEE Posix 1003.2 and 1003.2a draft
ISSUE 1
MICROSOFT MAY MAKE DEADLINE AFTERALL;
TELLS OEMs WINDOWS NT SHIPS JUNE 15
Microsoft has been telling key OEMs that it will start shipping both
the client and server portions of Windows NT 3.1 worldwide on
Tuesday June 15. The software is reportedly scheduled to be released
to manufacturing on Saturday June 5. The commitment comes admid
mounting press reports that NT, or at least the NT Advanced Server,
would seriously slip Microsoft's self-imposed June 30 delivery
deadline. OEMs said they felt 80% confident the June 15 schedule
would hold.
LIST PRICES SAID TO BE $495 & $2,995;
SIX-MONTH PROMO WILL CUT THEM TO $299 & $1,495
Microsoft has reportedly fixed list prices at $495 for the client
and $2,995 for the server. A special six-month promotion offer is
supposed to bring prices to $299 for the client and $1,495 for the
server. Microsoft is thought to be pricing against recent desktop
Unix entries such as SunSoft's Solaris-on-Intel and Univel's
UnixWare. Solaris x86 is due to ship May 29 at $795. Novell's Univel
joint venture halved its prices in March as a pre-emptive strike
against the threat of Windows NT. The UnixWare client-side Personal
Edition is now $250, the cheapest Unix on the block, and its
Application Server is now $1,300. There will doubtless be cheap NT
upgrades available to Windows and OS/2 users. Microsoft has
previously speculated that the software would be subject to almost
immediate street discounting but it can't let NT prices sink too low
without impacting Windows 3.1. OEMs themselves are expecting varied
discounts hinged on volumes. One said Microsoft would likely do most
of its OEM business at 80% off. Microsoft has been burning the
midnight oil attempting to get NT out on schedule, with staffers
putting in 70 and 80 hours weeks. Travel has been curtailed so
people could focus on the launch today in Atlanta and outsiders who
have visited Redmond over the last 11 years say they've never seen
the intensity level so high. As important as meeting the deadline
is, NT's robustness is believed to have been of greater concern.
Shoddy goods could damage Microsoft's chances of vaunting into the
enterprise. As confident of NT's quality as Microsoft's shipping
plans imply, it is still generally acknowledged that it will months
and months before the software is sufficiently hardened to run
mission-critical applications.
EX-MIPS CHIEF RESURRECTS ACE VISION;
STARTS BRAND NEW NT-ON-MIPS COMPUTER COMPANY
One-time architect of the ACE Initiative Bob Miller, erstwhile chief
of MIPS Computer Systems Inc and its successor MIPS Technologies
Inc, is bent on hammering out his initial vision. In February, he
left MIPS Technologies to start NeTpower Inc, a brand new hardware
maker dedicated to building Windows NT boxes based on MIPS' R4x00
RISC chips. The Sunnyvale, California-based fledgling is backed by a
first-round investment of around $6.1m from MIPS' owner Silicon
Graphics Inc and venture sources including Institutional Venture
Partners, the Mayfield Fund, New Enterprise Associates and Onset
Enterprise Associates. NeTpower expects the money to last until
early next year when it contemplates going for a second round that
it will attempt to minimize by virtue of the cash flow it should be
generating from selling its products. It figures if it needs much
more than that it might as well close up shop. NT will have failed.
If NT hits, however, NeTpower believes it will be doing a few
hundred million dollars worth of business in three to five years.
The 25-man company has collected what it regards as a star-studded
string of old Unix veterans to run the joint. Besides Miller, it's
got co-founder Edward Frank as VP of R&D, a Distinguished Engineer
at Sun Microsystems, architect of Sun's Sparcstation 10 desktop
multiprocessor and a principal in the creation of First Person Inc,
Sun's recently formed highly secretive consumer electronics
subsidiary. Then there's VP and chief architect Skip Stritter,
another co-founder, who also helped start MIPS and was there as VP,
development programs. In a previous life, Stritter had been
Motorola's chief architect on the 68000 microprocessor family.
NeTpower's also picked up sales VP Ralph Mele from MasPar Computer
Corporation where he had been VP, worldwide sales and support after
running SGI's North American Field Organization. It got its
marketing VP Linda Hargrove from HP's General Systems Division where
she had been worldwide marketing manager for the HP9000 Series 800
machines and it got its product marketing director John Novitsky
from Intel where he managed Pentium's product planning and technical
marketing teams. NeTpower expects to deliver its first three unnamed
turnkey machines in volume this fall: a sub-$5,000 entry-level R4000
desktop, a sub-$10,000 high-end R4400 desktop and a low-end sub-
$10,000 R4400 deskside server. The entrants presuppose a networked
client/server architecture. Next year, in what will be co-founder Ed
Frank's third implementation of a commercial symmetric
multiprocessor, it anticipates breaking into SMP. The boxes are
currently in external alpha sites where the company hopes to
validate some of the assumptions still swirling around NT and the
MIPS architecture such as whether a MIPS NT machine can hack it in
the Intel environment as a price/performance player. NeTpower
machines are meant to look, feel and smell like a PC. They fit in a
baby AT form factor and incorporate ISA expansion slots. The company
has turned its nose up at EISA as unnecessary and used its own high-
speed local bus. There are built-in SCSI and networking resources.
Its beta experience this summer will help NeTpower sort out exactly
how the machines should be configured. Stuff like the monitor,
standard RAM size (probably at least 16MB), and whether to make CDs
optional versus price. The NT market being akin to a continent in
formation, such seemingly obvious requirements are not at all that
obvious, making NeTpower a valuable case study. The entry client
machine will probably use a 50MHz R4000 MIPS chip and deliver around
60 Specmarks performance; the server will probably use a 75MHz R4400
and deliver around 90 SpecMarks. The box in between is currently
iffier about such things as chip frequency and size of secondary
cache. NeTpower has decided to use Acer's new PICA R4000/4400 six-
chip chipset designed specifically for NT PCs for its initial
machines. Later it will develop its own chipsets. Like other NT
merchants, NeTpower will have to meet ISV and developer skepticism
about whether
the Windows NT APIs are really identical for both Intel and MIPS
machines. They're also going to have to counter a lot of Unix FUD on
this issue too. However, according to NeTpower, all the current
evidence suggests that yes, they are. Meaning the developer doesn't
really even have to port his software from one to the other, simply
recompile. The issue is an important one to the whole MIPS NT
contingent since the available software is the only way any of them
can leverage into volumes. NeTpower and its ilk will also have to
prove that NT RISC machines actually deliver superior performance at
lower cost than their competitors. In the absence of any accepted
benchmark standards, the evidence is largely anecdotal. For
instance, NeTpower believes its R4000 machine can outperform a 66MHz
489DX2 by a factor of two on integer and a factor of seven on
floating point. Such claims need validation.
NeTpower figures to add considerable value to the standard MIPS NT
machine and it figures it will get a lot of the technology it adds
such as interconnect, NFS and tuned servers by using its machines
itself internally. As a result, it's doing what almost everyone says
can't be done or shouldn't be done with a 1.0 operating system
release: It's running the company on it. Everything mission-critical
from manufacturing and financial to marketing and sales,
engineering, chip design, board design and E-mail is reportedly
running on NT and as NeTpower's own machines come on-line it's
phasing out the 486DX2 boxes it started with. Its own internal needs
accounts for its port of NFS to Windows NT, for instance. ItNT:
ISSUE 1
MICROSOFT MAY MAKE DEADLINE AFTERALL;
TELLS OEMs WINDOWS NT SHIPS JUNE 15
Microsoft has been telling key OEMs that it will start shipping both
the client and server portions of Windows NT 3.1 worldwide on
Tuesday June 15. The software is reportedly scheduled to be released
to manufacturing on Saturday June 5. The commitment comes admid
mounting press reports that NT, or at least the NT Advanced Server,
would seriously slip Microsoft's self-imposed June 30 delivery
deadline. OEMs said they felt 80% confident the June 15 schedule
would hold.
LIST PRICES SAID TO BE $495 & $2,995;
SIX-MONTH PROMO WILL CUT THEM TO $299 & $1,495
Microsoft has reportedly fixed list prices at $495 for the client
and $2,995 for the server. A special six-month promotion offer is
supposed to bring prices to $299 for the client and $1,495 for the
server. Microsoft is thought to be pricing against recent desktop
Unix entries such as SunSoft's Solaris-on-Intel and Univel's
UnixWare. Solaris x86 is due to ship May 29
avvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvnning a mixture of NT and Windows 3.1. The
facility will be available to senior student, faculty and staff to
let them experiment with NT.
Mortice Kern Systems Inc is shipping a beta release of its new MKS
Toolkit for Windows NT, including tools for command editing and
history, file processing and comparison, text manipulation and
sorting, a Windows Vi full-screen editor and the company's Make
software construction tools. MKS decided to break policy and ship
beta because NT is still a beta. The beta Toolkit is $99 and will be
upgradable to the general release for another $99 after NT ships. +1
519 884-2251
YA CAN'T CALL IT NT
Windows isn't the only trademark Microsoft is having trouble
getting. NT is also a no-go. Northern Telecom claims that it is NT
and has told Microsoft it can't use the designation. That's why
Redmond is trying to squeek by using Windows NT instead and stamp
out all references solely to NT. The situation is complicated by the
fact that Northern Telecom is a big Microsoft customer. It could be
worse. Windows NT seems to have greater strategic implications,
however accidental.
Publisher's Statement
It is the purpose of this newsletter to supply the industry and its
users with strategic information about Windows NT. Like its sister
publication, the Unix weekly, Unigram.X, it is pledged to fact and
fair comment. Good honest gossip, the lifeblood of the computer
business, also has its place. Like Unigram, its format will be
concise and pointed, its style a touch brash and, with any luck, a
bit controversial. Its object will be to break the stories that give
its readers the real inside track. Microsoft is unquestionably a
force to be reckoned with. NT, if it lives up to only half of its
billing, clearly deserves a forum of its own for the benefit of
competitor and adherent alike. With its experience of 32-bit
operating systems and knowledge of the political landscape, ClieNT
Server News aims to be that forum. --MO'G
Microsoft said that because of its own difficulties with the
designation NT (see page x) Ziff-Davis, publishers of PC Week
[ital], will have to withdraw those intent-to-use trademark
applications it filed with the US Trademark Office in September of
last year for the names NT Sources, NT Week, NT Computing, NT
Shopper, NT User and NT Magazine.
???????????Sequent, which is putting Windows NT up on symmetric
multiprocessors, says there will actually be three versions of the
operating system: the client, an inexpensive four-processor retail
model of the Advanced Server and a 16-processor OEM-only version of
the Advanced Server which it's using. Bill Gates, by the way, bought
7% of Sequent back in March.
Rumour has it NT contains 4 million lines of code, 60k in Assembler.
Star Technologies' says its multiprocessor, supplied by Amtec of
Switzerland and based on Corollary's symmetric multiprocessing
technology, was the only machine shipped to the Microsoft booth at
the Hanover Fair in March that was able to run NT straight from the
box. It was also used to run the Microsoft show network.
Novell has released the second beta of its NetWare client for
Windows NT free on CompuServe. It supports single log-in to the
NetWare network and NT desktop, links NT desktops to NetWare or LAN
Manager servers with a single adapter card and an upgraded SPX II
transport for better routing and performance in a WAN.
David Flack, the esteemed editor of McGraw-Hill's UnixWorld [ital]
magazine, has hung the tag "threatware" on NT.
Sun Microsystems, king of the Unix workstations, had better watch
its flank. Access Graphics, its key distributor, has been quietly
entertaining NT box peddlers.
CONGRUENT SUPPORTS X WINDOWS ON NT
Congruent Corporation reportedly has technology for NT to support X
Windows apps running on X terminals and workstations, creating a
multiuser configuration of X displays. Unix developers can use NT to
host X applications and companies can standardize on Windows NT and
still have the features and economy of X terminals. The resulting
application will not be optim_
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