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TECH - Bell Labs java rival real-soon-now

Sent from: jim@SmallWorks.COM (Jim Thompson)

SAN FRANCISCO--Researchers at AT&T Bell Labs have been quietly working for
the last nine months on a project designed to take on Sun Microsystems' Java
programming language. 

Dennis Ritchie, creator of Unix and the C programming language, and a team of
ten Bell Labs scientists developed the project, code-named Inferno. Ritchie 
revealed details about the Inferno plan at the UniForum trade show here this
week, a Bell Labs spokesperson confirmed. 

Bell Labs' plans for marketing Inferno are still unclear: Ritchie's group is 
soon to be transferred to Lucent Technologies because of the recent AT&T 
restructuring, and AT&T is expected to soon become a Java licensee itself. 
Ritchie did not indicate how much longer it may take to complete the Inferno 
project. 

But Ritchie said this week that Inferno could be used in a wide variety of 
machines, including television sets and PCs, according to a report in the 
San Jose Mercury News. 

Ritchie is careful to not criticize Sun's Java development work, but opted 
against collaborating with Sun on the Inferno project and suggested that 
Java has become too complex, the Mercury said.
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