If the German market is anything to go by, the influence of Unix is slowly but surely creeping into the mainframe world despite resistance from long-standing large users of proprietary systems, but according to Computerwoche, a report by the Kronberg-based arm of the International Data Corp research group shows that the most entrenched opponents of the open systems operating system are IBM mainframe users. The IDC report used two surveys carried out in 1988 and 1989: for the first, 154 mainframe users – 100 IBM 3090 users, the rest with Sperry or Burroughs machines from Unisys Corp – were polled; a year later, interviews were conducted with 69 3090 users and 31 Unisys customers – the other 54 of the group polled in 1988 had already become Unix users. Computerwoche points out that in this respect the survey is not completely representative, because it leaves out users of Amdahl mainframes, which include a Unix derivative in native mode. According to IDC’s most recent estimates, Unix machines currently account for 4% of the German market for machines costing more than two million deutschmarks ($1.3m), with Crays installed for technical and scientific applications making up much of this figure. But IDC reckons that the increasing popularity of Unix for small and medium systems and support for the operating system from name suppliers will boost the demand for Unix in the mainframe world over the next five years. Nonetheless, the resistance to Unix among IBM users remains strong: while 26% of Sperry and Burroughs users said they could imagine running life or death applications on Unix, a massive 96% of IBM users rejected that possibility out of hand first because they reckoned that Unix could not handle extensive databases well enough, and second the impression persisted that Unix was not user-friendly.
