Книга: Distributed operating systems

10.1.1. History of DCE

10.1.1. History of DCE

OSF was set up by a group of major computer vendors, including IBM, DEC, and Hewlett Packard, as a response to AT&T and Sun Microsystems signing an agreement to further develop and market the UNIX operating system. The other companies were afraid that this arrangement would give Sun a competitive advantage over them. The initial goal of OSF was to develop and market a new version of UNIX, over which they, and not AT&T/Sun, had control. This goal was accomplished with the release of OSF/1.

From the beginning it was apparent that many the OSF consortium's customers wanted to build distributed applications on top of OSF/1 and other UNIX systems. OSF responded to this need by issuing a "Request for Technology" in which they asked companies to supply tools and other software needed to put together a distributed system. Many companies made bids, which were carefully evaluated. OSF then selected a number of these offerings, and developed them further to produce a single integrated package — DCE — that could run on OSF/1 and also on other systems. DCE is now one of OSF's major products. A complementary product, DME (Distributed Management Environment), for managing distributed systems was planned but never made it.

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