California Software Products International Inc has competition and IBM Corp is going to hate it, although rather more in Rochester, Minnesota than in Austin, Texas. The competitor is the Newport Beach, California-based Universal Software Inc subsidiary of Acom Computer Systems Inc, and the product is Open RS/36, a complete IBM System/36 emulation environment for the RS/6000. Biggest attraction of the product – apart from the fact that even on a Model 320, its claimed to be 4.5 to 12 times faster than a B24 System/36 – is that it offers load member compatibility with the System/36 so that once libraries and data files are transferred – on quarter inch tape or direct via twinaxial cable to the Micro Channel Adaptor on the RS/6000 they run unchanged, and applications can be carried across without recompilation. Open RS/36 includes a System 36 look-alike environment so that users do not have to learn AIX administrator functions, and the ability to run object code unchanged solves the problems of users that don’t have source code for their applications – or whose RPG II programs have embedded assembler subroutines or non-IBM RPG extensions, or have Cobol programs. Open RS/36 transfers the RPG II and Cobol compilers, and DFU, SDA and SEU development tools to the RS/6000 and adds source-level debugging capabilities, including the facility to step through RPG and Cobol source programs while displaying and modifying variable contents and indicator status on the RS/6000. MAAPICS and DMAS programs with custom add-ons can be transferred without the need for rewriting, and files remain in EBCDIC but can be also be accessed by alien programs by using a C subroutine that translates them to ASCII on the fly. An RPG to C translator-compiler is planned for October. It’s due next month, the first licence costs $400 per user with a minimum charge of $4,000; for the second to the fifth licence the charge is $300 per user with a minimum of $3,000. The transfer facility is $4,000, and RPG extensions are $500 each; the company wants distributors.
