Apple and IBM have firmed up their joint venture. Apple's Ed Birss will handle day-to-day management, under the "evangelistic" leadership of Metaphor's David Liddle. Most of the 100-150 Cupertino staff members will be from Apple. [Rory J. O'Connor, SJM, 10/2.]

Silicon Graphics (Mountain View, CA) is licensing its graphics software to Intel, DEC, and Microsoft. The Intel and Microsoft links will help bring workstation graphics capabilities to PCs. This will also help Intel cut into MIPS' share of the ACE operating-system consortium. [Lee Gomes, SJM, 9/14.]

Industry is taking a step toward a unified UNIX standard for distributed computing environments (DCEs). The Open Systems Foundation's DCE is supported by 50 vendors (IBM, DEC, HP, ...) and development kits should be available by 1/92. A separate distributed management layer (DME) based on HP's Openview network management system will interface between applications and the DCE. Unix International has 20 vendors (Sun, NCR, Unisys, ...) behind its Atlas environment, which is a superset including both DCE and a DME. Although the two companies can't agree on a single standard, they have agreed to make the two systems interoperable. Programs on the two network operating systems will be able to communicate. [Joanie M. Wexler, Computerworld, 9/23.]

Jerry Speasl, former EVP of Mirage Systems, has joined SRI International (Menlo Park, CA) as VP of product development for the Engineering Research Group. [SJM, 10/2.]

John Doyle is retiring as HP's Executive VP of business development, after 34 years with the company. Doyle has also been chairman of the Open Software Foundation. [SJM, 10/1.]