On September 5, IBM introduced an onerous $57,100 charge for an RPQ that it said was necessary to enable 3090 J model users to add third party add on memory to their machines. Needless to say, the company received howls of protest from the add-on memory makers, since the change seemed to be designed specifically to spoil their business – and on Wednesday this week, IBM put out an announcement saying that while the engineering change will still be needed, users can have it by ordering a new RPQ, which carries no charge. Observers believe the quick retreat by IBM was occasioned in part by the one little victory that used IBM mainframe engineering company Allen-Myland Inc scored over IBM in its long-running anti-trust suit last month, where the judge ruled that in a similar case where IBM charged $330,000 for microcode when a multiprocessor was split by a third party into two smaller ones, the size of the charge was restrictive and violated the company’s 1956 anti-trust decree (CI No 1,508).
