Amdahl Corp has abandoned its six-year Aspen effort to develop an IBM 370-compatible operating system specifically for high throughput trans-action processing, and has decided instead to devote all its operating systems development effort to its UTS implementation of Unix System V. The company told analysts last week that the 40 or so people who had been employed on Aspen would transfer to the team working on UTS, and that features from Aspen were likely to turn up in new releases of UTS, starting next year. In particular, the Aspen user interface and communications would be applied to UTS. Amdahl is estimated to have spent be-tween $15m and $20m on the Aspen development effort, and the operating system has been extensively beta tested at Electronic Data Systems in Dallas and at Stanford University. Amdahl says that while the Aspen technology was good, UTS represents a much better market opportunity.
