Its green-on-black character screen stood out like a sore thumb at Networld+InterOp last week, but IBM Corp’s AS/400 division is not embarrassed about where it’s coming from. The Unix industry hides its by-and-large character-based community behind groovy graphical user interfaces at its trade events. But now even the AS/400 division has succumbed, planning to add a graphical user interface to OS/400 as GUI/400. The software comes from Dordrecht, Netherlands-based Seagull Business Software BV, with a base in Poway, California, and IBM has licensed the run-time version. The Duth software also crops up in Atlanta, Georgia-based American Software Inc’s DeskPro for AS/400 application, which provides a Windows interface for its suite of AS/400 Supply Chain Management software. American Software is also distributing GUI/400 development kits so that users can extend and customise DeskPro. IBM’s version for OS/400 will initially have OS/2- and Windows-style front ends; a Motif look-alike is expected to follow. The GUI/400 interface will be released with the new version, a free upgrade, rather than a paid-for new version, of OS/400 that will be available for the next-generation PowerPC AS-based boxes in the fourth quarter. OS/400 is now up to 3.1, and the new release of the operating system has been pencilled in internally to appear as OS/400 3.6, although there seems to be some movement towards giving the thing a name. Meantime it appears that there will be two versions of the 64-bit PowerPC AS multi-chip variant of the PowerPC 630 on which the combined AS/400-System/36 units are being built, a uniprocessor and a multiprocessor.

Vertical and horizontal

Although OS/400’s Vertical and Horizontal Licensed Internal Code, VLIC and HLIC, has been re-written in C++ as the object-oriented System Licensed Internal Code, SLIC, to run the operating system on PowerPC AS, the experience of AIX’s ill-fated dabbling with personalities has forced the Rochester, Minnesota-based AS/400 labs – like other IBM groups – into a complete re-think about how it might run non-OS/400 applications under hosted personalities. The division’s work to bring Spec 1170 Unix application programming interfaces to OS/400 is apparently unaffected, since that is not regarded as a personality issue, but the job will not even be nearing completion by the time OS/400 3.6, or whatever it is called, hits the streets. Meantime IBM was showing off Lotus Development Corp Notes and Novell Inc NetWare implementations of its FSIOP front end last week: it is an Intel Corp 80486 add-in board for managing local networks of personal computers from within OS/400. IBM already has a LANServer version of the FSIOP. The Notes and NetWare implementations will be out by year-end, it promises. It had wanted to rename the ungainly File Server Input-Output Processor Server Accelerator, but found out the tag is already taken, so it is sticking with FSIOP until it can find something better.