June 19, 1988

OPENING THE KIMONO: Atari Corp. may have settled its suit with Micron Technologies, but not many are aware that the Sunnyvale personal computer maker is also looking for a chip company of its very own.

“We’re definitely looking at being a vertical chip company,” said Sig Hartmann, executive VP of Atari’s business development group. “We need to buy a chip house.” Atari CEO Jack Tramiel has always liked the idea of having his own chips — while heading Commodore, he bought MOS Technology, and both Commodore and Apple based early computers on MOS’s 6502 chip.

One recent prospect was Inmos Corp., the British firm whose transputer chip will be used in an upcoming Atari workstation. Hartmann says Atari talked to Inmos, but no deal was cut.

Meantime, Atari is again girding its loins for the U.S. personal computer market. Hartmann says its color 1040ST machine (based on the Motorola 68000) is already faster than Apple’s Mac SE. A Motorola 68030 machine is already in the labs as well, though Hartmann says it’s “more than 90 days” away from shipping and won’t say much more.

Atari does have an image problem, and its software lacks the elegance of the Macintosh. But Tramiel usually gets what Tramiel wants, and this should be a battle to watch in the next few months.

IN THE OINTMENT: I’d like to have been a fly on the wall for the meeting that supposedly took place not long ago between Motorola and Sun Microsystems. Motorola tried to convince Sun that its Sparc chip was a dog and that Sun should just scrap it and jump on Motorola’s own 88000 bandwagon.

Then I heard Bill Joy, Sun’s founder, took a meeting at Digital Equipment Corp. to chastise it about forming the Open Systems Foundation (OSF), a group of renegade Unix vendors who’ve had it with what they think is AT&T’s high-falutin’ attitude about the upcoming converged Unix (that’s System V, Rel. 4).

Nathan Brookwood, a director for D.H. Brown Associates in Santa Cruz, wouldn’t comment on the rumors, but he did have some interesting info about why OSF may be successful.

Though AT&T hasn’t yet published provisions for licensing the new Unix, prospectives who’ve heard the spiel say there are big problems with “critical timing windows.”

Check this out: From the date AT&T releases the new version of Unix, vendors have to do two things:
* First, ALL licensees would be required within a fixed time (probably six months) to have a converged Unix product on the market.
* Second, they’d have another fixed amount of time to completely withdraw all products using old versions of Unix from active marketing — essentially giving AT&T, and in turn, Sun, vast control over the product calendars of some major vendors. “And that’s not a provision that DEC or IBM could live with,” says Brookwood.

Who does AT&T think it is? “The telephone company! Only the telephone company would have the chutzpah to suggest such a thing,” says Brookwood. “All during the creation of OSF, vendors were telling AT&T they couldn’t live with such a license. I’ve even heard that Sun told them they were being unreasonable. But AT&T said they thought it was important.”

MOVIN’ ON: Susan Kare, an original member of the Macintosh team who had since joined up with Steve Jobs at Next, has left the company.

Kare was creative director for Next, responsible among other things for hooking Jobs up with Paul Rand, who designed Next’s distinctive logo. When reached by phone, Kare acknowledged her departure, but says she left Next “happy and amiable — we’re still going to work together.” At Apple, she designed the ubiquitous smiling Mac, fonts and icons, and screens like the elegant Japanese woman often pictured in Mac ads.

Clients are already lined up to work with Kare, who’ll be free-lancing from her San Francisco office with a color Mac II. But she needs more RAM, so keep her in mind.

WAIT-AND-SEE: A product from Screenplay Systems, the Macintosh Compatibility Package (MCP), may cause yet another big look-and-feel rash at Apple. MCP, it’s said, ports Mac programs written in LightspeedC, including screen display, to MS-DOS with only tiny differences in appearance. Sounds like a legal bomb waiting to explode, but the company’s executives say it doesn’t use a single drop of Apple code.

RUMORS FALSE AND TRUE: I actually heard, for a nightmarish few minutes last week, that Steve Jobs was planning to team up with IBM to sell his Next workstation when it comes out. Then I heard it wasn’t true. Then I heard Jobs was going to show The Machine at a torturous (4.5 hours!) press marathon for Steve Wolfram’s much-ballyhooed Mathematica program (which Jobs is bundling with the machine) next week. Then I heard the plug got pulled on that, too.