Not too many people seemed to notice in the welter of flackery about its new Open Systems Interconnection 370-type mainframe software products, but IBM has given itself almost two years before it needs to ship anything that enables SNA and Open Systems networks to co-exist and communicate – it is March 1990 that the first MVS Open Systems products are due to ship. But the company does not intend to waste the intervening time, and yesterday it announced that it was investing $5m over two years in a project to develop an advanced network integrating different computer systems and functions, with parts of the University of California at Los Angeles campus serving as a laboratory for future academic and business communication links. A major goal of the joint effort is to enable users of SNA networks to communicate easily with ones using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, TCP/IP, and vice versa. Ultimately, the new campus network at UCLA will embrace 10,000 workstations, reaching all buildings on a 411 acre campus, serve several off campus networks, and also give access to supercomputers.
