The whole outlook for what used to be the Soviet Union was altered irretrievably by the bungled coup and its ignominious failure, but the disruption was so brief that international commercial links were unaffected: the Russian language edition of Computergram continued to be published, and ICL Plc’s negotiations for the formation of a joint venture to market its Unix systems reportedly were unaffected. ICL, which despite claims to the contrary, was the first Western computer company to get accreditation to trade in the Soviet Union, and has maintained a representative office in Moscow through good times and bad ever since 1968, is now building on the goodwill it has engendered to form ICL-KMECS in the Kazan, in the Tatarstan Republic of the Russian Federation – which is said to be doubtful about wanting to remain part of Boris Yeltsin’s Republic – and the partner in the venture, KMECS, manufactures the Rjad copies of the IBM Corp 360 and 370 – and claims to have an installed base of between 15,000 and 20,000 machines. The new company will be 60% owned by ICL, 40% by KMECS, and will start life with about 100 employees, five from ICL. It will initially market DRS 6000s and DRS3000s – provided it gets round CoCom restrictions on RISC CPUs.
