The things are not even announced until March 20, and Compaq Computer Corp is already rubbishing IBM’s first major foray into the personal computer server market. According to the Wall Street Journal, IBM plans PS/2 Micro Channel servers based on the 80386 and the 80386SX, and the machines will come with up to 1.3Gb disk using the SCSI interface. The company is also working on an 80486-based model but that is understood not to be ready yet. They will make use of the bus-mastering capability of the Micro Channel, but the word from Compaq is that the things are simply a slight repackaging of the PS/2s with faster disk access. The Compaq Systempros come with one or two processors, distribute data over the disks for fast access, and will have an element of fault-tolerance. But IBM’s biggest problem will be in pricing the things so that they are competitive with rival offerings without cannibalising sales of the low-end AS/400s: they will clearly be attractive systems on which to run the Baby/36 emulation of the System/36 environment from California Software International Inc, although third parties will be confined to the MS-DOS version of Baby/36 – IBM has acquired exclusive rights to the OS/2 version.
