IBM didn’t come out with the new AS/400 blandishments to persuade recalcitrant System 36 users to migrate up the route so carefully mapped out for them any too soon: the Unix vultures are gathering enthusiastically over the expiring older models of System 36 – and all those System 34s still out there – in the hopes of weaning users away from their dependence on IBM and into the liberating world of Open Systems. We haven’t heard from the company in the UK on the subject, but in Germany, the Munich outpost of Liant Software Corp, Framingham, Massachusetts has come out with version 3 of the LPI-RPG-II compilers, an implementation of the System 34 and System 36 RPG programming environment, Version 5, which runs on 80386-based computers with Interactive Systems Corp’s Unix System V.3.2 or Santa Cruz Operation’s SCO Unix System V/386. Special attention will be paid to achieve an System 36 look-and-feel, says Liant, to reduce to a minimum the necessity for users to have to struggle with Unix directly. Terminal definition data will make it possible to use the development system on every workstation. Liant says LPI-RPG comes as a package with a compiler and a systems navigation language which both interprets OCL Operations Control Language commands as well as offering an interface to many of the service program functions, which can be easily used on System 34 and 36. In addition, there is a data conversion program to translate existing data from EBCDIC to ASCII as well as other tools to aid portability. For an unlimited number of users the complete system costs the equivalent of $8,080, reports Computerwoche – the run-time module is available for a cost of $4,035.
