Early hopes that the 9370 would be a runaway winning product for IBM were fuelled by two monster contracts – one from the US Post el Service, the other from Ford Motor Co – but the latter has turned bitter as gall for IBM. Ford wanted to replace the Texas Instruments DS990-based systems in 5,000 of its dealerships with IBM 9370s running the same software, but after struggling for over a year to write an emulator to enable the software from the DS990s to run on the 9370 unchanged, IBM gave up and according to Electronic News, advised Ford that it would be prudent to consider going back to Texas. The problem was that the architectures were so different – the Texas machines have a unique con-tinuous memory architecture – that the software crawled on the 9370, especially in input-output operations. It would have need-ed a more powerful and costly 9370 than anyone had bargained for to get reasonable performance, with large dealers needing a 9377 Model 90. But Texas is moving its own base away from its proprietary architecture and on to Unix machines based on the iAPX-86 and MC68000 chip families – Ford is taking SP1000, TI1300 and TI1500 machines – how does it solve the problem? The UK company says it is a simple and efficient procedure. A preport source indicates the chan ges are needed and a suite of pro grams will then make 99% of the alt-erations. It can be done either by Texas itself, or by its resellers.
