Press Release

Press Release

VITA NUOVA

Vita Nuova to ship Inferno on the Compaq iPAQ

FOR RELEASE TUESDAY, JUNE 26^TH, 2001

Vita Nuova will be demonstrating a Compaq iPAQ running the Inferno operating system at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2001 in Boston on June 28^th-29^th. The demonstration will show a full Inferno port including wireless networking, the Inferno virtual machine, Tk graphics, web browser with HTML3.2 and JavaScript 1.1, and a full development environment all running in under 3Mb of flash (uncompressed). In addition a number of distributed applications will be on show emphasizing Inferno's ability to aid the construction of distributed applications. Unlike so many operating systems Inferno was designed with distribution in mind. Uniquely, it can operate as a native OS on devices such as the iPAQ but can also run as an application on existing operating systems such as Windows, Linux and Solaris.

The iPAQ port is part of a new release of Inferno being made available July 2001, which includes many changes to Inferno, both large and small.

"The Compaq iPAQ port offers software developers an alternative to the royalty based operating systems normally found on the iPAQ." Commented Michael Jeffrey, CEO of Vita Nuova. "However, the choice of operating system is not simply one of cost. Inferno can dramatically reduce the development time normally associated with distributed application development by providing exactly the same environment on both native platforms like the iPAQ and existing systems running Windows, Linux, Solaris and others".

Inferno boxed sets (including source code CD) can be purchased from as little as $150. The Inferno licence is not open source but does allow royalty free binary distribution and access to all the source code to the system - which you can modify. The iPAQ port will be made available free of charge to anyone who has purchased Inferno.

UK Press Contact:		US Press Contact:
Karen Russell Vita Nuova Holdings Ltd 3 Innovation Close York Science Park York YO10 5ZF England		Michael Baldwin Vita Nuova Inc. 240 Park St Montclair NJ 07042 USA
Tel: +44 (0)1904 428649 Fax: +44 (0)1904 428628 Email: karen@vitanuova.com		Tel: +1 866 TEL VITA (835 8482) Fax: +1 866 FAX VITA (329 8482) Email: baldwin@vitanuova.com

Web Site: www.vitanuova.com

Corporate

Founded March 1^st, 2000, Vita Nuova is a privately held company with headquarters in York, England and offices in New Jersey, USA. Vita Nuova is an operating systems company specializing in technologies for distributed application development on network devices. Vita Nuova has exclusive world-wide rights to the Inferno operating system and is the first and only distributor of Plan 9 in a box.

Vita Nuova is addressing the exploding market for distributed applications across a wide range of computing devices. The company is developing a large, vibrant community of developers using the technologies of Inferno and Plan 9 and has customers in most developed countries.

I Ii
Inferno

Inferno is a network operating system based on more than 30 years of research in operating systems and programming languages by Rob Pike, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson and others at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs. Inferno is clearly a cultural descendant of UNIX, however, it looks out on a very different world from UNIX. Complexity is no longer confined to mainframes but is pervasive throughout world-wide networks. Inferno addresses the complexity as follows:

Replaces a plethora of protocols by a simple, unifying file service protocol (Styx) that can be served on tiny devices, giving a uniform way to access objects across the network.

Lets applications 'compute a name space': all resources are represented as file systems, which an application assembles into an application-specific hierarchy or 'name space', private or shared, that hides their source, local or remote, and nature, static or dynamic, for completely transparent access.

Using those primitives, implements windowing systems, networked graphics, remote debugging, device control, and much more, with remarkable ease and great simplicity.

Inferno runs as a native, embedded operating system on a wide range of processor architectures and also, uniquely, as an emulated operating system environment on Windows, Linux, Solaris and other systems. It is this portability that makes Inferno the number one choice for distributed application development.