With IBM starting to catch it up in mainframe Unix, Amdahl Corp is moving to keep one jump ahead, and is now acquiring the means to increase its applications base. It signed a multi-year software licence agreement with Suffern, New York-based Rapitech Systems Inc, worth $1m between now and July 1990. The pact is for Rapitech’s Conversionware conversion tools, designed to translate programs in proprietary dialects of Fortran, VMS-Fortran, Cobol and other languages into standard C, 1977 ANSI Fortran and Ada. Amdahl also announced that it had now successfully implemented IBM’s Enterprise Systems Architecture and MVS-ESA operating system on its top-end 5990 mainframes, and will start shipping new 5990s with ESA before the end of November, upgrades in December, a month early.
