VIEWOTR-Peddar Ltd – the market research group formed by the merger of the OTR Group with Peddar Associates in January – has published a new survey on the state of the Unix market in the UK. According to the company’s latest report on Operating System Trends, Unix was used on 21% of all UK machines in 1990, a figure that rose from 16.9% in mid-1989, and should stand at 25.4% in mid-1991. The Peddar report took account of UK installed systems costing UKP15,000 or more. But, says the report, although Unix is now the preferred option for departmental systems, the entrenched positions of DEC’s VMS and IBM’s MVS and VM are still a major obstacle to the penetration of Unix in the large computer arena. In mid-1990, only 4.1% of DEC installations were Unix-based, compared to 15.9% of IBM machines – sounds highly unlikely, 17.4% of Hewlett-Packard and ICL, and 58.1% of Unisys hardware – or did they count Convergent CTOS too? Peddar surveyed some 13,000 systems in the UK for the UKP1,750 report.
