X / Open Company, Ltd. - A consortium founded by UNIX European suppliers in 1984 to create and promote open standards in the field of information technology. The initial goal was to define a single specification for UNIX-derived operating systems to facilitate porting of software. The first members of the organization were Bull , ICS , Siemens , Olivetti and Nixdorf - sometimes called BISON. Soon Philips and Ericsson joined them, after which the name X / Open was coined.
The group published its specs called the X / Open Portability Guide (or XPG). Version 1 described common system interfaces and was published a year after the creation of the group. Version 2 appeared in 1987 and described internationalization, interprocess communication, the programming languages C , Kobol , Fortran and Pascal , as well as interfaces for SQL and ISAM .
The XPG3 standard followed in 1988, its main objective being the proximity to the POSIX specification.
The latest version of XPG, the X / Open Portability Guide Issue 4 (also known as the Common Applications Environment Specification Issue 4 (CAE4) ), was published in July 1992. The Single UNIX Specification was based on the XPG4 standard.
By 1990, the group consisted of 21 members: Nokia from Europe joined the original members; AT&T , DEC , Unisys , Hewlett-Packard , IBM , NCR , Sun Microsystems , Prime Computer , Apollo Computer from North America; Fujitsu , Hitachi , and NEC ; as well as the Open Software Foundation and Unix International .
X / Open operated the UNIX trademark from 1993 to 1996, when it merged with the Open Software Foundation to form The Open Group .