IBM yesterday sneaked out first details of plans to embrace – at arm’s length – its Unix systems into its families of proprietary systems – initially only the PS/2s, but the plans are very much in their infancy, because although a string of products was announced, delivery dates for them will not be announced until the end of the year. The name given for the new products is DataTrade, and DataTrade is a set of communications programs designed to provide a consistent application programming interface for data transfer between distributed applications running on different IBM processors under different IBM operating systems. The programs come in two parts – a Manager, resident and executing in a server that supports multiple workstations, and a Workstation Feature for each station. Applications can use common communication support, data interchange facilities and reliable local area network broadcast to create an integrated system. Where the server is a PS/2 under AIX, the thing costs $12,500 on the server, plus $2,000 for each RS/6000 workstation, and $1,500 for each PS/2 station under AIX, $1,000 for each one under OS/2. The Systems Application Architecture DataTrade/2 server version is $10,500, workstation versions are priced as above. When the RS/6000 is used as a server, prices are $15,630 for the smaller ones, $15,530 for the middle ones and $24,420 for the top one.
