Back in 1984, IBM declared that Transaction Processing Facility from the Airline Control Program would over time become a strategic product that would stand alongside MVS and VM in the IBM pantheon of operating systems. Bringing that day a big step nearer, the company has announced a major new release of TPF with the promise of a string of extensions. The product runs native on a 3090 – that is without a host operating system, and its main historic drawback, the fact that it ran only on a uniprocessor has now been overcome. And to make the product much more attractive as an operating environment it now supports the C/370 compiler where previously, users had to write in Assembler. Details of the Extended Systems Architecture release, page two.
