UNISYS has recently launched a range of new servers and workstations to broaden its CTOS SuperGen product line. The releases demonstrate Unisys's change in tactics with the CTOS system, moving completely to industry-standard hardware and away from proprietary technology. At the high-end of the range, Unisys has used Intel's Pentium processor for the SuperGen 7000 server. Unisys began using Intel chips when the 386 became available, but until then the CTOS range had not sold well. Unisys said it hoped by gradually changing to industry-standard hardware, sales would improve. ''Going Intel-based gives us some benefits; lower costs and the users are happier in terms of software support,'' said Jim Seymour, Unisys' business development manager in the distributed systems division. Initially, CTOS computers had to emulate the DOS environment on a co-processor, but that resulted in problems with many applications unable to run on the machines. When the 386 was released by Intel, Unisys ran DOS on it, in conjunction with CTOS. The company found that ''dirty'' coding on some applications remained troublesome. ''Now, Windows has really helped virtually all these DOS applications,'' said Mr Seymour. ''It was difficult to engineer the changes demanded by the market fast enough but now we're on this kind of PC-based architecture, we can keep up with the changes.'' But it would be unfair to describe CTOS as proprietary. ''What is affecting the CTOS market is the terms and definitions concerning the openness of UNIX,'' said Mr Seymour. Even with the new releases, Unisys intends to remain focused on its traditional market in retail and banking because of the multi-tasking and mission-critical strengths of CTOS. A report by the Business Research Group (BRG) says that out of the three-year costs of networking for mission-critical applications for Novell Netware, IBM LAN Server, Unix and CTOS, CTOS was 30 per cent less expensive than the next cheapest solution - Novell. The new SG7000 supports up to 48 users and has a multi-processor design. The SG6000 is designed to be a cluster server which is upgradeable to Pentium, while the SG4000 is server/workstation supporting up to 32 users with memory expandable to 128 megabytes.
