Huron and you’re off the mainframe will be the battle cry at Amdahl Corp as the company bites the bullet and faces up to the fact that after IBM Corp’s precipitous and ill-thought-out announcement on December 16, the decline and fall from favour of the mainframe will be greatly accelerated. Ed Thompson, Amdahl’s wise and well-informed chief financial officer has been talking to Electronic News and reveals that Amdahl is repositioning its white hope for building new business, the Huron applications development environment. Originally conceived as a rapid applications development system for the MVS mainframe world, it is now being recast as a major aid for moving mainframe UTS Unix and MVS applications down to the multiprocessor Sparc-based system that Amdahl is developing. Thompson would not give a precise release date for the Sparc machine, but said it would be 1994 before it made a meaningful financial contribution to the company. Amdahl already has a version of its UTS Unix running internally on a Sparc system, and the planned machine is described as similar to Sun Microsystems Inc’s top-end Sparccenter 2000, which will eventually support up to 20 SuperSparc processors and costs between $100,000 and $250,000. If it is intended to appear in the second half of this year it seems likely that Amdahl will not be able to wait for Sparcs fabricated to the full 64-bit specification that was agreed by Sparc International last summer, and will have to settle for one of the already available superscalar versions, which have some 64-bit features. A key feature of Huron, now available for Intel Corp 80486-based systems and going onto the RS/6000 as well as Sparc shortly, is that users can develop applications with it before they have decided on the target hardware – applications will run on any of the supported architectures. Amdahl plans to bring its Sparc systems in below mainframes with a view to the two co-existing. The Huron state of play was discussed in detail in CI No 2,015.
