Unisys Corp is crowing over a recent report from US research company, the Aberdeen Group. It praises the company’s BTOS/CTOS family of workstations which are merging under the CTOS/Open banner (CI No 1,390), and Unisys has announced that the first merged version of the Convergent operating system is available for its new XE530 server (CI No 1,375). Unisys’ OEM customers have agreed to comply with the common standard, and the company has published the second version of of the Applications Programme Interface guide. The Aberdeen Group says CTOS already has integrated workgroup capabilities that MS-DOS, OS/2, and several local area network managers are merely begining to contemplate. As regards the cost of departmental workgroup systems, the Aberdeen Group gives the cost of an AS/400 Model 35 with 32 users at $80,000, and says that a comparable XE530 system would cost $40,000. The Group went on to claim that a networked PS/2 OS/2-based local area network server costs $28,000, but the equivalent B39 configuration comes in at $24,000. Additional PS/2s cost $10,000, and B28s are only $2,600. The CTOS message-based structure also received a deal of praise. In the event of power failure, the system does not lose work in progress, and it offers transparent network data retrieval. When comparing Unix and CTOS, Aberdeen says that CTOS is no less open, and it commends Unisys for the number of communication protocols that it supports. All of which represents something of a poisoned chalice for Unisys, which needs yet another major operating system to support like it needs a hole in the head.
