IBM Corp’s Personal Software Products division plans to demonstrate symmetric multiprocessing for OS/2 2.1 at PC Expo in New York City next week. It will demonstrate five applications running concurrently on a four-processor system, and claims up to 85% improvement in application performance for productivity applications running on a two-way multiprocessor. And Newsbytes reports that before its licensing deal with Microsoft Corp runs out, IBM will launch its own version of MS-DOS 6.0, calling it PC-DOS 6.1, and will also preview it at PC Expo.PC-DOS 6.1 is claimed to solve a large number of problems that early users of MS-DOS 6.0 reported, including some of the conflicts with other terminate and stay resident packages. A new version of Memmaker, the MS-DOS 6.0 memory manager, is included in PC-DOS 6.1, which has been updated to take account of other memory managers in active use, such as Quarterdeck Software Inc’s QEMM. It is expected to cost $5 to $10 more than Microsoft’s version, for which the user will get a full suite of utilities with PC-DOS 6.1, such as Central Point Software Inc’s Anti Virus. The company will also offer a 24-hour support line.
