sbq@verdix.com (Sam Quiring) (11/26/90)
In case you missed it, there was an article in the 11/15/90 issue of EDN (pg. 5) about the Real-Time Consortium (RTC) and their plans to create an industry-standard basic input/output system for real-time operating systems. The goal of this group, as I understand it, is to standardize a set of interfaces to be named the Open BIOS (OBIOS) so that a device driver written for one complying real-time operating system will work on any other complying real-time operating system. It wasn't clear from the article if recompilation would be required to move the device driver from one system to another. RTC hopes to have a preliminary OBIOS spec available for comment and review at Buscon West in February. Copies of draft work in progress are available on Internet via anonymous ftp from RTC@gate.ready.com. The RTC members include Microware, Ready Systems, Wind River Systems, and Force Computer, Heurikon, and Lynx. Uniflex is expected to become a member soon. I hope that this group is able to quickly succeed in accomplishing their standardization goal. I got a kick out of two quotes in the article: "Writing device drivers is one of the most agonizing and time-consuming aspects of system integration. By minimizing the number of drivers that must be written, OBIOS will greatly streamline the system integration process." -- Todd Wynia, Heurikon product marketing manager. "We're very supportive of the effort," says Mike Burgher, western regional manager at Microware. "But we feel the whole standardization effort should be legitimized. The board vendors love it, but we don't tend to see much direct benefit for OS/9." Sam Quiring Verdix Western Operations uunet!vrdxhq!verdix!sbq