88open was an industry standards group set up by

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent public companies, Motorola ...

in 1988 to standardize Unix systems on their

Motorola 88000 The 88000 (m88k for short) is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Motorola during the 1980s. The MC88100 arrived on the market in 1988, some two years after the competing SPARC and MIPS. Due to the late start and extensive delays re ...

RISC In computer engineering, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a complex instruction set compu ...

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor or just processor, is the electronic circuitry that executes instructions comprising a computer program. The CPU performs basic arithmetic, logic, controlling, an ...

systems. At its peak, the spinoff 88open Consortium Ltd. had a staff of 30 people and over 50 supporters. The effort was largely a failure, at least in terms of attracting attention to the 88000 platform. The group was closed in favor of the

AIM alliance The AIM alliance, also known as the PowerPC alliance, was formed on October 2, 1991, between Apple, IBM, and Motorola. Its goal was to create an industry-wide open-standard computing platform based on the POWER instruction set architecture. It ...

, and the 88000 platform was folded into AIM's

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple– IBM ...

Members

Motorola provided 50% of the financial support for the consortium. Early members were

Data General Data General Corporation was one of the first minicomputer firms of the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Their first product, 1969's Data General Nova, was a 16-bit minicompu ...

Convergent Convergent is an adjective for things that converge. It is commonly used in mathematics and may refer to: *Convergent boundary, a type of plate tectonic boundary * Convergent (continued fraction) * Convergent evolution * Convergent series Converg ...

, and

Tektronix Tektronix, Inc., historically widely known as Tek, is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. Originally an independent ...

. By May 1988, 28 companies had joined with 7 not releasing their names.

Standards

*Object Compatibility Standard (OCS): An 88open standard for compilers and linkers.

References

{{Motorola Data General Motorola Standards organizations in the United States Technology consortia

Members

Standards

See also

References