Amdahl Corp has decided to shrink itself further by spinning off its Unix programming language tools into a new privately-held company, Lexa Software Inc, in Santa Clara, California. In exchange for a financial interest in the new company and a three-year contract allowing Amdahl to distribute Lexa products, Amdahl has transferred its Unix tools, which are designed to enable the development and deployment of applications across Amdahl’s UTS mainframe Unix operating system and Sun Microsystems Inc SunOS and Solaris. Lexa will offer C and Fortran native compilers, cross-compilers and attendant software development tools that work on and across System/390 UTS and Sparcsystems. Lexa focuses on providing identical tools for each environment that are designed to make it simple to carry out the various tasks associated with development in the most logical location. Amdahl Corp also added new 6395-3 and 6395-5 disk arrays below its 6395-9. The 6395-5 offers 50% more capacity per volume in half the floor space of its predecessor, the 6395-3, offers very fast access, the same half-size footprint and storage equivalent to that of its predecessor 6390-3.The 6395-3 is $91,500 for 11.35Gb, $2.1m for 360Gb from January, the 6395-5 $132,300 for 17Gb, $3.1m for 545Gb, from next month.
