While Fujitsu, Hitachi and NEC all flourish on the international market via their various OEM arrangements, Japan’s only other surviving mainframe manufacturer, Mitsubishi Electric, languishes back home. Its original Cosmos mainframe line was derived from licences sold it by now-defunct Xerox Data Systems, and its early 1980s strategy had been to upgrade its Cosmos Sigmalike users to a new generation of IBM-compatible machines. That was thrown into disarray by the scandal of NipSting when Hitachi and Mitsubishi agents were caught red-handed trying to buy IBM secrets. Mitsubishi is changing tack again, and plans to offer a single near-IBM-compatible operating system on its four series by mid-1988. It currently has GOSVS and UTSVS on mainframes; OS60 for minis and DPS10 for office computers. The new operating system is being written to run IBM applications, and the strategy will be to offer its machines to large IBM 3090 users in competition with 4381s and 9370s, so the same programs can run on all CPUs.
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