Throughput in transaction-intensive applications is becoming an increasingly critical issue in competitive bids these days, and DEC has been falling behind the competition with the VAX. The company has confirmed that it plans to do something about it next week, and it is expected to announce enhanced terminal handling and a major new trans-action-oriented version of the RDB rela tional database, and DECintact, based on an Application Control and Management System bought in from Advanced Systems Concepts Inc, Schaumberg, Illinois. The new systems will be merged with VAXcluster and DEC’s network management systems, and are expected to enable the company to claim twice the price-performance of IBM’s AS/400 for the VAX in transaction-intensive work. And DEC claims that its new VAX grammar checker, Nashua, is the first computer-aided proofreading software to correct documents by analysing sentence structure, rather than checking words against stored word and phrase lists.
