The faction within IBM that believes in Unix is making very excited noises about the fact that its Advanced Interactive Executive/370 version for customers of the company’s most powerful processors will be available in the first quarter of 1990 (CI No 1,242). This means, it says, that IBM will have fulfilled its pledge – in two years – to provide custom-rs with advanced, consistent open software function across a full range of AIX products based upon industry standards. The family of AIX products includes AIX PS/2, AIX/RT and AIX/370 – although of course existing RT users will find themselves orphans because the new AIX won’t run on the present RT models. IBM is offering customers the broadest range of products in the Unix industry, declares senior vice-president George Conrades, who is general manager, US marketing and services. We are committed to industry standards and to providing the open systems solutions requested by our customers in this rapidly growing area of the computer industry, he insists. But despite that professed commitment, no-one who is really serious about Unix on 370-type machines is going to want the IBM offering if they can get Amdahl Corp’s UTS implementation because UTS runs native whereas AIX/370 is a bit of a kluge, running only under VM, and therefore likely to appeal primarily to Unix dilettantes rather than serious users. IBM reports that AIX/370 is currently installed in 13 customer test sites, and will be installed in a number of others over the next several months under a limited availability program. Less inelegant AIX/370 Network File System, a separate licensed program implementing the NFS 3.2 protocols developed by Sun Microsystems Inc and enabling file transfer with third party systems via an Ethernet or IBM Token-Ring local area network. It also enables users to access files stored on other systems running MVS or VM. For those who have forgotten, IBM’s solution to the ASCII-EBCDIC problem with Unix in AIX/370 is a little less inelegant than the clumsy use of a Series/1 mini as a terminal concentrator by IX/370 – with AIX/370, terminals can be (expensive) RTs or PS/2s under AIX, or MS-DOS micros using an AIX Access for PC-DOS Computers facility, which seems to imply that you can’t attach dumb terminals to the operating system on the mainframe. With general availability, AIX/370 will be compliant with the IEEE 1003.1 Posix standard. As reported, X/Open-compliant AIX will be available in the third quarter of 1990. Information regarding the planned general availability of support for AIX/370 in VS Fortran Versi-on 2 Release 5 and the Engineering and Scientific Subroutine Library will be announced in first quarter 1990. AIX/370 and AIX/370 NFS will provide support for double byte character sets in the third quarter 1990. The old IX/370 implementation of Unix will be withdrawn from marketing effective March 30, 1990, and support will end at the end of next year. No up-to-date prices were given, but at the time of announcement, AIX/370 was a flat $3,000 a month, or on one-time charge ranged from $27,000 on a baby model 9370 to $144,000 on a 3090; Network File System was $2,400 to $9,600 or $200 a month. Both were originally promised for March 1989, so they will be a whole year late, which puts IBM’s hand-on-heart affirmation of its commitment to Unix into perspective.
