With 18 new – or fairly new – processors, major new releases of its three 370 operating systems, two major new systems management concepts and important new releases of DB2, IMS and AD/Cycle Repository Manager/MVS, IBM yesterday laid a beautiful System/390 counterpane over what remains the unmade bed of its System/370 product lines. Announcing so much on a single day ensures that the entire IBM-watching community blows a string of fuses from information overload, and large and important parts of IBM – not least the press departments – are in a similar state of information shock. All of which suggests that the slam-bang pile-it-all-in-there approach to product announcements will defeat its overriding purpose – that of keeping IBM’s mainframe salesmen busy through the next nine months to a year until the company can start shipping the first two Summit machines – the ES/9000 Models 820 and 900. If the professionals are overwhelmed, one can be sure that most users will be in a state of paralysis, and where they need additional machines will settle for the cheapest stop-gaps they can find on the used market while they decide how much of the IBM ticket they will vote. The new processors are as outlined in CI No 1,499 – the only variance is that the model we called 280 is in fact 260, except that the 90X1 numbers were suppressed yesterday to emphasise the ES/9000 concept of a single range. The one area where IBM should be able to do plenty of business is with the 4391, the Models 190 to 320 unprocessors and the 440 and 480 dyadics. The big advance on these air-cooled machines is that they now take vectors, and support PR/SM partitioning. The new operating systems are MVS/ESA SP Version 4, VSE/ESA 1 and VM/ESA 1, out in October, December and March respectively: all new machines and operating systems support 31-bit addressing.
