IBM to support UNIX on 4300

[Chris Lewis]

This is the second IBM UNIX for 370 series announced within the last year.
The previous one titled VM/IX was a "special bid PRPQ" (I think that is the
term).  This means that the product is not generally announced.  Your
local IBM representative is supposed to determine which of his customers
would benefit from it, and then petition the regional IBM Office for
permission to let the customer ask for it.  At a previous employer I
was attempting to evaluate and possible acquire a copy of VM/IX.  I found
out quite quickly that VM/IX wasn't particularly useful.  Due to political
constraints, VM/IX has two major drawbacks which made it impossible for
us to use it with our large 308x VM/SP3 system:

	1) It has no support for 327x screens (IX/370 has this problem).
	   You must have a Series/1 front end with ASCII serial terminals.
	2) VM/IX will not run on VM/SP HPO (high performance option).

Now, we weren't too terribly concerned with point 1 - the Series/1 is fairly
inexpensive and we had quite a few serial terminals at the time.  It was
a substantial inconvenience though, because the building was only wired
for 327x clusters.

However, the second problem is quite severe.  After all, when you have
a BIG system with lots of users you really need HPO.  Downgrading our
system to non-HPO was obviously not an option.  So, our only practical
alternative was to get a 4300 for the VM/IX.  That was too expensive.
So, I gave up on it.  In addition, I'm not sure that VM/IX was really
intended for anything other than 43xx processors.  It may not have been
supported on anything larger - though I know that it IS running on bigger
machines.

The reason I bring this up is that people should make sure whether IX/370
supports HPO before dashing out and buying it for your big blue behemoth.
Obviously VM/IX was primarily intended for situations where customers were
looking for a big blue alternative to buying a VAX.  VM/IX is not suitable
for existing VM/SP systems.

[ These are my own opinions - not necessarily any of my employer's.  They
don't know anything about this anyhow ]

Chris Lewis
Computer X (CANADA) Ltd.
utzoo!utcs!mnetor!clewis