On the IBM product front, the smart money on Friday was going on the company announcing some X models of the 3090 on January 26 or 27, with the favoured offerings being an overall 12% to as much as 25% improvement in price-performance, new channels, but likely at only 4.5Mbytes-per-second rather than 6 – because of MVS/XA limitations, and possibly a new 3090/300 model (not upgradeable from a 200) and possibly a 600 model; upgrades to the new processors are expected to be offered only to the next machine up, so that there will be no 150X, and if you want to upgrade a 180, you can only go to a 200X and so forth; a new 3880 controller and higher capacity disk drives are expected to follow by end-March.
