Is 88open dead? What does the Apple-IBM-Motorola agreement mean to DG? (Data General Corp.)

More standards. It seems every time I pick up a computer periodical, someone is coming up with a new standard. I guess there's big money in making your product the standard, while at the same time making the competing standards look like they're somewhere off in left field. A friend of mine upon seeing all of the recent new standard announcements made the observation that, "The nice thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from." Ain't that the truth!

Anyway, in the last few months, a whole bunch of the big boys have gotten together to form their own new "standards" for the Unix workstation market. What these standards mean to the future of 88open is the hot topic of conversation around here and probably in the inner sanctums of DG these days. How these emerging standards might affect DG and it's users in the next couple years is of major concern.

By the way, the last time I wrote something about 88open that wasn't gushing with the requisite level of enthusiasm, they sent some guy after me with a machete (well maybe it just seemed like he was carrying a machete). Hopefully, they've gotten used to it by now.

88open and the AViiON. Basically, 88open is a consortium that's sole purpose for existence is to promote software development on the Motorola 88000 RISC processor. As most people in the industry have found out, you can't have a successful product without attracting the top developers to port their products to your platform. So, 88open was founded …