The eye-catching headline IBM Corp is seeking from yesterday’s launch of the AS/400 E models is that the top three models E70, dual processor E80 and triple processor E90 come fitted with the company’s new 16M-bit memory chips, which have a very competitive access time of 60nS, and enable the company to claim to be the first to ship a machine with 16Ms when shipments begin on March 6. On the software front, CICS/400 should be out by year-end, and IBM has thrown in the towel on word processors and adopted the market leader, offering Wordperfect Corp’s Wordperfect 4.2 – that’s the latest character-based release – as Wordperfect/400. In future, OS/400 users will be able to nominate an Editor of Choice, the main choice being Wordperfect or Displaywrite to start with. Another software innovation is a performance monitoring tool that runs under Microsoft Corp’s Windows 3.0 (!) using the personal computer attachment feature, and enables users to watch what is happening in all parts of the system in real time as the applications run, all displayed by icons. The company also announced a data dictionary for the AS/400 database, giving it the absurdly grand and misleading name of SAA AD/Cycle Application Development Manager/400. OS/400 2.2 will ship in late November. Progress Software Corp’s eponymous database front-end environment will now also be supported on the AS/400. On the hardware front, major new peripherals include the 3490E rack-mounted tape drive at from $30,000, which transfers data at up to 4.5Mbytes-per-second for the first time on the AS/400 and stores 2.4Gb per cartridge with compression. The Corsair 3.5 disk drive formats down to 988Mb on the AS/400 and comes in all 9404 and 9402 E models in place of the two 471Mb drives that were standard previously. There are also price cuts on the 9336 disks. The full line-up is the E02, E04 and E06 9402 models; E10, E20, E25 9404 models, and the 9406-based E35, E45, E50 and E60 plus the three top models mentioned above. On pricing, IBM says that where a 64Mb D50 with 4.3Gb disk using 9336s costs $287,155, an E50 costs $240,905. Adding 96 terminals, a page printer, two line printers, 12 character printers and a tape drive $234,000 on the D50, $214,905 on the E50, and a typical suite of system and applications software is $121,427 on either, for a system price of $642,585, which comes down to $605,885 with revenue-based discount. On the E50, the system is $556,428 with discount. An E45, which is equivalent in performance to a D50 (shame on you for suggesting all they have done is to change the nameplates) is $457,687 with discount. System prices for a 128Mb D70 with 12.8Gb disk and 200 terminals on the same basis is $1.283m; an E70 is $1.162m, and an E60, equivalent to the D70, is $1.003m. At the bottom end, a D10 is $22,300, an E10, $23,800 and an E04, equivalent to the D10, IBM says, is $16,400. For System/36 5360D users, IBM recommends an upgrade to an E45, and is offering users upgrading OS/400 and OfficeVision half price and a 9336-20 disk at the price of a 9336-10. It is also offering System/36 users a service under which it will convert any single application to 36 emulation mode on the 400 for $3,000. It is also of fering conversions to AS/400 native mode, but pricing is on a case-by-case basis. In the UK, there is no price list and 16M-bit chips will not be on the first boxes shipped.
