IBM Corp and Bristol Technology Inc yesterday officially announced their alliance to enable Windows NT applications to run under OS/390 (CI No 2918) – if you knew where to look for it. Bristol has created a version of its Wind/U development environment for System/390 and says it will enable C and C++ programs written to the Windows NT application programming interfaces to run under the OS/390 bundled version of MVS. IBM is billing the move as the latest demonstration of its commitment to provide open client-server application capabilities on System 390. Wind/U already provides a common development environment for Windows and Unix, and makes use of the Unix extensions to OS/390 to achieve the emulation feat. Developers can recompile and link their application source code with the Wind/U Library using IBM’s development tools on OS/390 to generate a native Unix version of their application. The Wind/U applications have the same functionality as the original Windows NT programs. These applications can be further enhanced by exploiting OS/390 interfaces and middleware. Bristol Technology is a licensee of Microsoft Corp’s Windows Interface Source Environment program, which provides it with source code for Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows NT on an ongoing basis. No firm release date or pricing was given for the mainframe emulation of NT.
