New Unix Software Aims at Non-Scientific Market

Unix Systems Laboratories on Tuesday unveiled a new, easy-to-use version of its venerable Unix computer software--popular among scientists and engineers who use high-powered workstations--in an effort to reach the broader desktop computing market.

Unix Systems Labs, a New Jersey company that is 68% owned by American Telephone & Telegraph, hopes to stem the confusing proliferation of variants of Unix and provide customers with an alternative to advanced software operating systems supplied by IBM and Microsoft.

First developed by AT&T; in the 1960s, Unix, like other software operating systems, controls the basic functions of a computer. It has been the operating system of choice for scientists and engineers, and it has slowly gained acceptance on large, general-purpose business computers.

But even though it is far more powerful than MS-DOS, the operating system used on most personal computers, Unix has been slow to make inroads in the PC world. That’s because it is difficult to use, requires a great deal of memory and has few of the software applications programs--such as spreadsheets or word processing--that are needed to make computers useful.

USL hopes that its new Unix software will change all that. It features an easy-to-use graphic interface similar to the one used on the Apple Macintosh, and it can run on PCs equipped with a 386 computer-on-a-chip and featuring at least 4 Mb of memory and an 80 Mb hard-disk drive. Many newer PCs meet those standards.

And if it is adopted by enough computer manufacturers, the new Unix could provide new incentives for software applications developers who have shied away from Unix because there are too many versions and none of them had sufficient market share.

The goal is to make Unix a viable competitor both to OS/2, an advanced PC operating system now being marketed by IBM, and Windows NT, the next-generation operating system that Microsoft is developing. All three of these operating systems promise PC users superior networking capabilities, the ability to perform more than one task simultaneously, vastly improved security and other features.

But many analysts believe that these new operating systems will be used primarily on powerful PCs and workstations that are used to control computer networks, rather than on standard desktop PCs.