IBM Corp is expected to launch a version of OSF/1 for its ES/9000s next month (CI No 1,738) but it remains to be seen whether there will prove to be greater demand for OSF/1 than there has been for AIX/370. IBM has until now been ostentatiously unwilling to abandon its proprietary operating system in favour of Unix, but now the company has woken up to the fact that it will have to go Unix to remain competitive Amdahl Corp’s UTS Unix system is said to be causing IBM particular concern, Computerwoche suggests. Hitachi Ltd is also diligently preparing its own mainframe implementation of OSF/1. Amdahl’s UTS specialist Tom Litterdauer is eager to play down the perceived threat presented by IBM’s OSF/1 system, saying that this is the third or fourth Unix that IBM has developed and let silently fall under the table. In Amdahl’s opinion, IBM is getting nervous as more and more substantial customers – such as authorities and telephone companies – are dropping MVS in favour of Unix. IBM wants to be able to conjure up suddenly a profound knowledge of Unix, Litterdauer told the West German weekly, but there is still a culture barrier between the systems – IBM is trying to introduce as many Unix capabilities as possible to MVS, and will maybe also develop a Posix-compliant version, but it won’t give up the proprietary base to its system. In view of the fact that the mainframe share of the computer market is shrinking, it remains to be seen whether there is a real future for mainframe-Unix. According to Dataquest figures, mainframes today represent 29% of the total computer market, down from 34% in 1986. Even in absolute terms, the mainframe market share is decreasing. The Californian Computer Intelligence counted only 25,391 IBM mainframe and 1,495 plug-compatible installations in the US in 1990, down slightly from 25,636 IBMs and 1,633 compatibles in the previous year – the first time, according to Computer Intelligence, numbers of mainframe installations have fallen.
