The Mannesmann Kienzle subsidiary of the West German steel giant – Mannesmann is much more at home with hefty steel pipes than it is with the kind favoured by the tecchies at Bell Labs – is nevertheless hanging its lederhosen on Unix. It recently bought into Unix by acquiring a controlling stake in Unix microsystems manufacturer PCS Cadmus GmbH of Munich, and says that by the mid-1990s all its systems will be Unix-based. But at the moment it reckons that current Unix machines do not reach the standard of its 9000 series – based on the rather unfancied Texas Instruments TMS99000 microprocessor – and its proprietary MTOS operating system. The company believes that Unix needs more horsepower than the average operating system and adds that as soon as a Unix machine rated at around 10 MIPS that is price – performance – competitive with the products it inherited with its Black Forest acquisition Keinzle AG comes out, it will go for it. In the mean time Kienzle has glued a number of its software products together, put them onto its MTOS-based 9000 series machines and is presenting them as Kiman – its Computer-Integrated Manufacturing offering. Kiman consists of the Kifis shop floor data collection system; the Manumark production planning and scheduling system; the Impact II financial management system; and the Kioffice office automation package.
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