Fujitsu Ltd’s impending acquisition of an 80% stake in ICL and management control raises the intriguing possibility that it may seek to reactivate a long-dead project to emulate IBM 370 architecture on 2900 mainframes – now Series 39: the thing was dubbed DME/370, and would be of no interest in live MVS sites, but could enable a more aggressive ICL to mop up a few disaffected sites still using IBM 4300s – rappelons que while it is just about impossible to build a 370 architecture machine that could also run ICL’s VME efficiently, the 2900 was originally designed to emulate several disparate architectures and DME/370 was run internally on 2900 CPUs in the late 1970s.
