IBM Corp has one of those kitchen sink announcements in which it chucks everything in set for next Tuesday, but it is not clear how much will prove to be reality and how much simply more promises of the Systems Application Architecture-AD/Cycle kind that turn out to be false trails. The story this time is a new version of MVS called OS/390 – but it turns out to be simply a new name for MVS/ESA SP 5.2.2 – and a lot more of the counterpane over an unmade bed subterfuge that tries to pretend that the mainframe DB2 database has lots in common with DB2/2 or DB2/6000, this time relating to 9672 and AS/400. New data warehousing and symmetric multiprocessing capabilities are expected for the OS/400 database that these days has to masquerade as a version of DB2. OS/390, simply a bundle of about 30 pieces of support software – Posix extensions, TCP/IP, Distributed Computing Environment, Distributed File System, Network File System, and LAN Server, plus Systems Object Model run-time and application class libraries – will only save users about 30% on the unbundled prices, and many won’t want anything like everything – and it does not arrive till late next year. There is a suggestion that communications enhancements to OS/390 will enable Windows, Warp and other graphical user interface-based client operating systems to access the mainframe directly rather than through 3270 terminal emulation, although what this really means is unclear – unless the mainframe is going to switch to ASCII coding and upset a vast army of users of EBCDIC-coded programs and data, the two are fundamentally incompatible and some kind of conversion is needed.
