Highlighting the damaging schizophrenia afflicting Unisys Corp as a result of trying to get to grips with its open systems and Unix mistress while having a wife and two proprietary mainframe lines to support, the company has declared war on IBM in its System 36 base, offering complete 36 RPG II support at better price-performance than the AS/400 – but it runs not on the Unix machines but on the A series. The RAMP RPG Application Migration Package has an automated migration facility that converts RPG II programs, related library members and data to native A Series mainframe code to eliminate emulation overhead: programs compile and run as they do on the System 36 but up to three times faster. The special package for System 34 and 36 users includes Workstation Data Link Processors to support IBM 5250 terminals and 522X printers on the Micro A, A1, A4 and A6, which the company claims spans the B20 to B70 AS/400s. The operating environment is claimed to be so similar to the Operation Control Language environment that no operator retraining is needed. The base price for an entry-level RAMP system is $19,900 with Micro A CPU with 12Mb memory, 280Mb disk, and 150Mb tape drive and the environment.
