Apple OS set to go multiplatform

There are signs that players in the Power PC consortium are divided as Apple chairman Gil Amelio said its operating system will not necessarily be limited to the Power PC platform.

At last year's Comdex/Fall event, Motorola, IBM and Apple reiterated their support for a common reference platform, meaning software and operating systems would run on each others' hardware.

But that plan has so far failed to materialise. According to US reports, Apple's Mac OS will be completely rewritten to enable it to run on other platforms including Sun, Intel and third-party chips.

Publicly, Apple has insisted it will stay with the Power PC chip. But IBM and Motorola have both concentrated on selling machines based on different operating systems.

Big Blue continues to sell RS machines using the AIX operating system, while this year the Motorola Computer Systems group announced plans to push its machines running Microsoft Windows NT.