If the 9370 was designed to send DEC reeling, IBM’s coup-de-grace for the minimaker came yesterday with an array of networking products that are intended to offer comparable ease of interconnection of disparate machines that DEC offers with DECnet and Ethernet. IBM characterised the announcement as the largest communications software launch in its history, saying that represents 500,000 new lines of code written by programmers from the labs in Raleigh, North Carolina, La Gaude, France, and other IBM locations. Two new releases of ACF/VTAM to improve peer-to-peer communications without an SNA host, support for native X25 on the 9370 under all operating systems, and improved NetView for remote management of 9370s headline the announcements, details of which are in page two. There are also new display terminals, and IBM extended maximum storage on the Series/1 4956 models J00 and K00 to 14Mb. In the US and Europe, IBM is offering a service that enables customers to test their systems for compatibility with terminals and computers that use IBM’s SNA. It is being offered over the Information Network in the US, but IBM gave no details of the UK plan.
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