ICL Plc is making further progress with its Open VME, the first proprietary operating system to gain base X/Open Co Ltd Portability Guide 3 branding – and the operating system turns out on closer inspection to be an actual implementation of a subset of Unix under VME for the company’s Series 39 architecture. None of these things should ever be dismissed as easy, but the architecture are of Series 39 and VME, radically different from the generality of mainframe architectures, lends itself to such clever tricks, because of the way the application and only the operating system code required by that application are wrapped up in a virtual machine. By thus taking modularity to its very limits, where necessary for compatibility and compliance reasons, some of that code can be Unix rather than native VME code. ICL has set up a conversion centre for VME users thinking of putting Unix applications up on their mainframes. The first to be completed, by mid-year, will be the Informix Software Inc database and its associated proprietary language applications. The Intelligent Query information retrieval package from Programmed Intelligence Corp was also being demonstrated at ICL’s Bracknell base last week. ICL claims to have had few teething problems with the implementation. On its first release to undisclosed users, Open VME is said to be one of the factors that swayed British Gas Plc to choose ICL over IBM Corp for its UKP200m October mainframe order.
