These things are relative, and it turns out that IBM Corp’s not far away with regard to its CICS transaction processing software for the RS/6000 (CI No 1,703) may still mean a year or two yet. Other sources translate the date to be as far away as late next year or sometime in 1993. The software will be a full member of IBM’s CICS family, and will be written on top of Transarc Corp’s transaction processing toolkit, which includes technology from the Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing Environment. It will support Logical Unit 6.2 Advanced Program-to-Program Communications for co-operating programming and transparent function shipping for distributed processing. It will enable the RS/6000 to hook into a mainframe or OS/2 CICS environment transparently. Unlike its brethren, the new software will support both Cobol and C programming, and handle IBM’s own databases as well as others that run native on the RS/6000, specifically Informix, Oracle, Sybase and Ingres it will also run on other hardware systems. Its developers also want it to conform to X/Open’s budding XA transaction processing interface standard, just as Unix System Laboratories Inc’s Tuxedo and NCR Corp’s Top End do.
