Ashton, Lotus May Develop Software for AT&T;’s Unix

American Telephone & Telegraph, fighting to establish itself as a lasting player in the computer industry after several disappointing years, is expected Monday to announce potentially pivotal agreements with four leading technology companies.

Although AT&T; declined to provide details of the news conference it has scheduled in New York, industry insiders said the company’s executives would be joined by high-ranking officials from Xerox, Sun Microsystems, Ashton-Tate and Lotus Development.

Lotus of Cambridge, Mass., and Ashton-Tate of Torrance, respectively the second- and third-biggest publishers of software for personal computers, are expected to announce that they soon will develop software for the Unix operating system, a set of basic computer operating instructions developed by AT&T.;

Lotus is best known for its popular Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program for financial calculations; Ashton-Tate’s major product is dBase, a data management system for personal computers.

Analysts said the availability of personal computer software written especially for Unix--and especially software as popular as Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase--would make the operating system much more attractive to corporate buyers. That, in turn, could give an important boost to AT&T;’s efforts to penetrate the corporate market with its Unix-equipped machines.

Sun, a fast-growing Silicon Valley computer maker, and Xerox, a New York technology company, are expected to join AT&T; in revealing further details about the effort to establish Unix as a commonly accepted operating system among computer makes and software writers. Sun and AT&T; already have announced their intention to jointly develop a new generation of Unix.

Xerox is expected to say that it has joined the Sun-AT&T; effort and will contribute the results of its long research into methods of making computers easier for the average person to use. Within the computer industry, Xerox has won high marks for the work of its scientists at Xerox Park, a Silicon Valley research laboratory known for developing some of the computer industry’s most imaginative “user interface” technology.

Interfaces are sets of internal programming commands that reduce the number of keystrokes users must know to work on a computer. Apple Computer’s Macintosh model, considered among the easiest-to-use personal computers, contains interface systems developed at Xerox Park.

Neither Ashton-Tate nor Lotus is expected to announce specific products for Unix, but insiders said it is safe to assume that their most popular programs will be the first to be rewritten for Unix. Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase are two of the best-selling programs for IBM PCs and compatible machines, which use the MS-DOS operating system.

Those programs cannot work on computers running the Unix operating system, which AT&T; has licensed to hundreds of companies since developing it 10 years ago.

“If Unix is to gain credibility and win support in commercial accounts, Lotus and Ashton-Tate are surely two . . . vendors you’d want writing software for Unix,” said analyst David Readerman of Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Co.

Operating systems such as Unix and MS-DOS control the basic operations of a computer, serving as a sort of traffic cop. Application programs such as Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase work with the operating system to enable a computer to perform specific tasks.

Although Unix is widely used by engineers and scientists, it now runs a distant second to MS-DOS in the corporate world.