IBM Corp has followed Unisys Corp’s lead and come out with a version of the RS/6000 that takes a System/390 mainframe processor board in one of its Micro Channel Architecture slots. As well as presumably making it cheaper for users that insist on going Unix than if they bought a 9672 and an RS/6000 separately, it also makes it a little less likely that they will decide to go Unix with Hewlett-Packard Co. The company also came out with a new release – Version 2.2 – of the VSE/ESA mainframe operating system, which it had hoped would by now would have been dead for a decade. It’s now official that VSE/ESA, direct descendent of the venerable DOS, lives beyond the millennium, because this release is stuffed with tools for getting to grips with the Year 2000 Problem. Available in the fourth quarter – thereby encouraging people to procrastinate over getting to grips with the big Problem for still a few more months, it also includes C run-time services, and debugging support for Cobol and PL/I to reduce application development time, as well as increased parallel processing capabilities, support for OS/2 LAN Servers and compatibility with the 3590 tape subsystem. The new R/390 has a Power2 for AIX, and runs OS/390, MVS/ESA, VM/ESA and VSE/ESA on the S/390 microprocessor; it will be out in June at from $90,000.There is a new 4.2 release of AIX with features to enhance portability, scalability and usability, with significant new Internet capabilities and packaging options. And software developers can now download SOMobjects Version 2.1 from the Internet at no charge. SOM 3.0 for OS/2 is on early release; site for SOMobjects is
http://www.software.ibm.com/objects/somobjects.
