Taking the PS/2 family of personal computers and their OS/2 native operating system a big step further into the corporate computing mainstream, IBM yesterday accompanied news that OS/2 1.1 with Presentation Manager would ship next Monday with launch of a major new program for OS/2 Extended Edition – CICS OS/2. Perversely dubbed version 1.1 (IBM confirms that there never was a 1.0 release), CICS OS/2 is designed to provide transaction processing on the PS/2 – and even on the AT and XT to the extent that MS-DOS can cope with it. Compatible with other CICS family products, CICS OS/2 extends the use of host CICS command level Cobol programs and personnel skills to the PS/2 and Personal Computer, so that low-demand transaction processing applications can be run in these machines – either in conjunction with transparent access to host data, or stand-alone. In the latter case, applications can be designed so that a sales operation or whatever can keep going when the mainframe is down provided all vital data is retained locally. And response times are independent of the loading on the host, except for accesses to host data. CICS OS/2 also enables the user to exploit the capabilities of OS/2 Extended Edition – multitasking means that local data can be queried while an unrelated transaction that accesses host data is executing. CICS OS/2 supports an applications-oriented subset of the Cobol command-level Application Programming Interface of CICS/VS and CICS/MVS so that source programs can be moved from host to PS/2 and vice versa. There is support for file control, temporary storage and transient data, minimum basic mapping support, interval control and syncpointing. CICS OS/2 also runs under MS-DOS, but with lower level of function and dependent on memory availability. It is $675 and ships in the US in February. IBM also announced that OS/2 Standard Edition 1.1 with the Presentation Manager graphical interface in a windowed environment is available on Monday in the US, with device drivers following in February. OS/2 1.1 is $340; the Programmer Toolkit is $340 and the OS/2 Technical Reference $787, both arrive in the US in December; the drivers are $210, February.
