Breathing new life into an old product, Bellevue, Washington-based Attachmate Corp has bundled its Irma for Windows mainframe access software with some fashionable Internet stuff, a TCP/IP protocol, and called it Irma TCP Suite for Windows. The advantages of the package, which integrates multi-host access, Telnet client emulation, native TCP/IP, Winsock-compliant TCP/IP protocol stack with the Internet access products, is that Windows-based personal computer users can directly interrogate mainframes, AS/400s and Unix machines, all from the one package, as long as everything is linked to by a TCP/IP network. The Internet offerings include Netscape Communications Corp’s Navigator World Wide Web browser, as well as an electronic mail reader, a newsreader to access news services on the Internet, and the Whois directory service among other things. It is available now for รบ200 and the company said there will be a version for network administrators that enables them to distribute software and control Internet access using a firewall, but there was no time-frame for any of this.
