The British Broadcasting Corp’s magazine distribution arm, BBC Frontline, based in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, has ditched its ICL Plc Series 39 mainframe in favour of a 670 MP Unix machine from Sun Microsystems Inc. The news comes a week after ICL won a facilities management contract from the BBC to look after its IBM Corp mainframes through its Computer Field Maintenance arm, as well as providing the BBC with an Open Hire agreement for Unix systems. Jointly owned by the BBC, East Midland Allied Press Plc and Haymarket Publishing Ltd, BBC Frontline installed its first Sun machine last year as its initial step away from VME to a more open Unix-oriented approach. The company commented that it had benchmarked machines like ICL’s DRS 6000 and a Sequent Computer Systems Inc server in December 1990 but they were not considered fast enough. It already has two Sun Sparcstations as clients, and one Sparcserver 670 running an Ingres database.
