X/Open Co Ltd yesterday pronounced ICL Plc’s VME operating system the first ever mainframe operating system to meet the requirements for compliance with release 3 of its Portability Guide. The first release of Open VME facilities will be made available to existing users in September with the next release of VME, SV292 (CI No 1,521). An optimised C compiler will be released with SV292 and an ANSI Cobol 85 compiler will be out later in the year. The announcement was made as ICL introduced its new OpenFramework blueprint of computing systems, interfaces and standards aimed at easing the corporate transition from a proprietary to an open computing environment – the result of a UKP100m 10-year research and development programme. Amid the excitement, ICL also found time to report net profits for 1990 down 29% at UKP65m on turnover down 1.2% at UKP1,612m.
