IBM Corp duly previewed its System/390 parallel and Power RISC-based Powerparallel computers yesterday, but if anyone was expecting a front page story, well so were we, because the company’s announcement was devoid of content beyond saying that the first two mainframe offerings will be the S/390 Parallel Query Server and Parallel Transaction Server, that they will be launched in the first half of 1994 – that has slipped from the first quarter, so it sounds as if they won’t ship before the fourth quarter next year, putting them a year behind schedule; IBM also said it plans an entire mainframe family based on microprocessor technology sometime after 1995, but all the signs are that the effort is an incredibly rushed programme only given the go-ahead shortly before Jack Kuehler revealed its existence; the company declined to specify pricing at this time, which only adds to the suspicion that the machines are no more than cardboard replicas of what the company plans.
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