COMPUTER INDUSTRY LEADERS EXTEND SINGLE UNIX* SPECIFICATION FOR 64 BIT SYSTEMS AND SUBMITS TO X/OPEN

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SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., February 14, 1996 -- Leading UNIX system suppliers participating in a working group have delivered a proposal to X/Open that extends the Single UNIX Specification to encompass 64-bit application environments. The proposed specification strengthens the consistency between existing UNIX system offerings as they evolve to support 64-bit operations. It will also allow software developers to easily migrate today's 32-bit solutions to next-generation 64-bit environments, and helps accelerate the creation of portable high-performance applications that will run on multiple 64-bit UNIX-based platforms.

The initiative, announced in August 1995, has the objective of reducing multi-platform application and system software development cost and complexity, protecting customers' software investments and simplifying the decision process for IT managers as they deploy 64-bit solutions.

"X/Open congratulates the working group on achieving the objectives of extending the Single UNIX Specification to 64-bit platforms and agreeing on a common data model. We will rapidly adopt these results into the existing X/Open Single UNIX Specification, " said Mike Lambert, Chief technology Officer of X/Open Company. "We are pleased to continue to evolve the specification and will start an accelerated activity aimed at maintaining and extending the value of UNIX as technology evolves. This will result in products that conform to the next version of the Single UNIX Specification in about two years time."

The working group participants reached consensus on the goal of this initiative to seamlessly incorporate 64-bit applications in a single UNIX specification. The common 64-bit definition for UNIX application environments builds on X/Open's Single UNIX Specification (previously known as SPEC1170) by removing data size dependencies in the application programming interfaces (APIs). The working group also agreed to implement a common 64-bit programming model, LP64, for consistency in data representation. In addition, the working group agreed to a common set of extensions to the POSIX Threads interface, dynamic linking interfaces to support the emerging class of extensible self-configuring applications, and agreed to implement common POSIX APIs for software installation and user group management, thus improving system management in multi-vendor installations. Technical whitepapers describing more detail on these specifications are available on X/Open's homepage.

The working group was composed of representatives from Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, IBM Corporation, Intel Corporation, Novell, Inc., NCR Corporation (formerly, AT&T GIS), Santa Cruz Operation, Inc., SunSoft Inc., and X/Open Company Ltd.

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