X/Open

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X/Open

X/Open Company, Ltd. was a consortium

Consortium

A consortium is an Professional body of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for achieving a common goal....
founded by several European UNIX systems manufacturers in 1984 to identify and promote open standard

Open standard

An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with it, and various properties of how it was designed....
s in the field of information technology

Information technology

Information technology , as defined by the Information Technology Association of America , is "the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications and computer hardware." IT deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to data conv...
. More specifically, the original aim was to define a single specification for operating systems derived from UNIX

Unix

Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of American Telephone & Telegraph employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna....
, to increase the interoperability of applications and reduce the cost of porting software. Its original members were Bull

Groupe Bull

Groupe Bull is a France owned computer company headquartered in Les Clayes-sous-Bois, outside Paris. The company has also been known at various times as Bull General Electric, Honeywell Bull, CII Honeywell Bull, and Bull HN....
, ICL, Siemens

Siemens AG

Siemens Aktiengesellschaft is Europe's largest engineering Conglomerate . Siemens' international headquarters are located in Berlin and Munich, Germany....
, Olivetti

Olivetti

Ing. C. Olivetti & Co., SpA., known as Olivetti, is an Italy manufacturer of computers, computer printers and other business machines....
, and Nixdorf

Nixdorf Computer AG

Nixdorf Computer AG was a computer company founded by Heinz Nixdorf in 1952. Headquartered in Paderborn, Germany, it became the fourth largest computer company in Europe, and a worldwide specialist in banking and point-of-sale systems....
—a group sometimes referred to as BISON.

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Encyclopedia

X/Open Company, Ltd. was a consortium

Consortium

Open standard

Information technology

Unix

Groupe Bull

Siemens AG

Siemens Aktiengesellschaft is Europe's largest engineering Conglomerate . Siemens' international headquarters are located in Berlin and Munich, Germany....
, Olivetti

Olivetti

Ing. C. Olivetti & Co., SpA., known as Olivetti, is an Italy manufacturer of computers, computer printers and other business machines....
, and Nixdorf

Nixdorf Computer AG

Philips

Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. , usually known as Philips, is a Netherlands electronics company. It is one of the largest electronics companies in the world, founded and headquartered in the Netherlands....
and Ericsson

Ericsson

Ericsson , one of the largest Sweden companies, is a leading provider of telecommunication and data communication systems, and related services covering a range of technologies, including especially mobile networks....
joined soon afterwards, at which point the name X/Open was adopted.

The group published its specifications under the name X/Open Portability Guide (or XPG). Issue 1 covered basic operating system interfaces, and was published within a year of the group's formation. Issue 2 followed in 1987, and extended the coverage to include Internationalization, Terminal Interfaces, Inter-Process Communication, and the programming languages C

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language originally developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories to implement the Unix operating system....
, COBOL

COBOL

COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages still in active use. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments....
, FORTRAN

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose programming language, procedural programming language, imperative programming language programming language that is especially suited to numerical analysis and scientific computing....
, and Pascal

Pascal (programming language)

Pascal is an influential imperative programming and Procedural programming programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structure....
, as well as data access interfaces for SQL and ISAM. In many cases these were profiles of existing international standards.

XPG3 followed in 1988, its primary focus being convergence with the POSIX

POSIX

Philips

Nokia

Nokia Corporation is a Finland Multinational corporation communications corporation, headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, a city neighbouring Finland's capital Helsinki....
from Europe; AT&T

AT&T

AT&T Inc. is the largest US provider of both local and long distance telephone services, and Digital subscriber line Internet access. AT&T is the second largest provider of wireless service in the United States, with over 77 million wireless customers, and more than 150 million total customers....
, Digital

Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering United States company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC ....
, Unisys

Unisys

Unisys Corporation , based in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, United States, and incorporated in Delaware, is a global provider of information technology services and programs....
, Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard

The Hewlett-Packard Company , commonly referred to as HP, is a technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States....
, IBM

IBM

International Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue" , is a multinational corporation computer technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, New York, United States....
, NCR

NCR Corporation

NCR Corporation is a technology company specializing in products for the retail and financial sectors. Its main products are point of sale, automatic teller machines, cheque processing systems, barcode reader, and business consumables....
, Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. is a multinational corporation vendor of computers, computer components, computer software, and information technology services, founded on February 24, 1982....
, Prime Computer

Prime Computer

Prime Computer was a Natick, Massachusetts-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. The alternative spellings "PR1ME" and "PR1ME Computer" were used as brand names or logos by the company....
, Apollo Computer

Apollo Computer

Apollo Computer, Inc., founded 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts by William Poduska , developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s....
from North America; Fujitsu

Fujitsu

is a Japanese company specializing in semiconductors, air conditioners, computers , telecommunications, and Service , and is headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Tokyo....
, Hitachi

Hitachi, Ltd.

is a multinational corporation specializing in high-technology and services headquartered in Marunouchi Itchome, Chiyoda, Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. The company is the parent of the Hitachi Group as part of the larger DKB Group companies....
, and NEC

NEC

is a Japan multinational corporation IT company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. NEC, part of the Sumitomo Group, provides information technology and network solutions to business enterprises, communications services providers and government....
from Japan; plus the Open Software Foundation

Open Software Foundation

The Open Software Foundation was an organization founded in 1988 to create an open standard for an implementation of the Unix operating system....
and Unix International

Unix International

Unix International or UI was an association created in 1988 to promote open standards, especially the Unix operating system. Its most notable members were AT&T and Sun Microsystems, and in fact the commonly accepted reason for its existence was as a counterbalance to the Open Software Foundation , itself created in response to AT&T's a...
.

X/Open managed the UNIX
Unix

Unix is a computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of American Telephone & Telegraph employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson , Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna....
trademark

TradeMark

TradeMark is a tall, primarily residential, skyscraper in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was completed in 2007 and has 28 floors. There are 200 hundred residential units....
from 1993 to 1996, when it merged with the Open Software Foundation

Open Software Foundation

The Open Software Foundation was an organization founded in 1988 to create an open standard for an implementation of the Unix operating system....
to form The Open Group

The Open Group

The Open Group is an industry consortium to set vendor- and technology-neutral open standards for computing infrastructure. It was formed when X/Open merged with the Open Software Foundation in 1996....
.

Output

The X/Open Portability Guide is a standard for UNIX systems originally published by X/Open Company Ltd. It is more general than POSIX

POSIX

POSIX or "Portable Operating System Interface" is the collective name of a family of related standardizations specified by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers to define the application programming interface , along with shell and utilities interfaces for software compatible with variants of the Unix operating system, altho...
.

The Portability Guide specifies the requirements for systems which are intended to be a UNIX system, or Common Application Environment (CAE). The XPG3 and XPG4 standards, released on 1989 and 1992 respectively, define all aspects of the operating system, programming languages and protocols which compliant systems should have.

The last version of the XPG, the X/Open Portability Guide Issue 4 (also known as the Common Applications Environment Specification Issue 4 (CAE4)), was published in July 1992 by The Open Group. The Single UNIX Specification

Single UNIX Specification

The Single UNIX Specification is the collective name of a family of standards for computer operating systems to qualify for the name "Unix". The SUS is developed and maintained by the Austin Group, based on earlier work by the IEEE and The Open Group....
was based on the XPG4 standard.

Chapters

The XPG4 specification includes these chapters:

System Interfaces and Headers (XSH), Issue 4, ISBN 1-872630-47-2 , C202
Commands and Utilities (XCU), Issue 4, ISBN 1-872630-48-0 , C203
System Interface Definitions (XBD), Issue 4, ISBN 1-872630-46-4 , C204

X/Open

Output

Chapters

See also

External links