The AS/3X Group, based in Andover, Massachusetts has a mission to help AS/400 and System 36 and System 38 users move in the direction of Systems Application Architecture by providing for these machines windowing products that comply with IBM’s Common User Access concept. The product is called Action-Bar Control/400 and offers any IBM mid-range terminal an action bar which, according to the Group, makes even an old 5251 terminal look and act like a personal computer. Currently, IBM menus lead to menus that lead to menus and so on. However, the Group claims that with Action-Bar Control/400 the pull-down menu leads the user straight to the standard IBM input panels which means that all options can be reached within five seconds. The product, which takes up 1Mb of disk space, retails at microcomputer prices with costs ranging from UKP100 for an AS/400 B10 to UKP200 for an AS/400 B70. ABC/38 and ABC/36 will also ship in June and are priced at UKP200. It comes with a 30-day money back guarantee and is distributed in the UK by CH Business Development Ltd of Leatherhead, Surrey. The AS/3X Group is targeting a mass market, aims to sell 10,000 units in the first year of shipping, and believes Action-Bar Control will be so popular that it will act as a hook for its other products. The company was set up 18 months ago by Leonard Ferro, who has spent most of his life as a data processing manager for various companies, and Bruce Camber, who has pursued academic research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology into human thinking and the way people interact with computers. Indeed, this human factors research informs everything that the company does. Its key product is the programmer’s tool QuickWindows, which features a free format of up to 1,000 bytes of data without the need for an additional Call, so that programmers no longer have to make each line a mirror image of the other with data displayed across the whole panel. Instead QuickWindows uses a free format to build a user-defined window of any size, shape and texture with SAA-CUA acting as a set of guidelines. Furthermore, by using QuickWindows with IBM’s Application Programming Interface, a window can be popped open so that the user can take data and interface it with other programs or people. For example, a user could execute a necessary print function through a window. The Group’s goal is to popularise human factors research via its products at both the end-user level and among managers of information systems. To this end QuickWindows is designed so that programmers can develop intelligent windows called SmartWindows which are integrated with intelligent function keys so that when a window is popped open, the window knows where a user is and provides an array of access paths to data that is logically related to the task at hand. Furthermore, by adding object-oriented techniques the window can become a tool to provide non-programmers with the ability to modify the functional definition of the window. With these concepts the AS/3X Group has developed a powerful front end to OfficeVision/400 called Strategy/400 which uses all the functional capabilities of OfficeVision but has no end-user menus and integrates OfficeVision with IBM’s Telephony Applications Systems – its release date is July. Meanwhile the Group says that many systems houses are interested in QuickWindows and it has shipped over 700 units to this type of customer since March. – Katy Ring
