Westi
Westi (Westinghouse Teleprocessing Interface System) was one of two early local
In 1981, WESTI was considered the main competitor to CICS, holding second place in market share for IBM mainframe transaction processing monitors.[1]
Initially written for the
Westi consumed less memory than CICS, which was attractive in the highly memory-constrained computing environments of the 1970s, in which 256KB was considered a large amount of memory.[2]
Westi operated as an
This differed from Westi's primary competitor, DUCS, which reversed that model in that it was a subroutine package that read from and wrote to monitors. While Westi was not as easy to program and use as DUCS, Westi (like CICS) handled task management.
In terms of speed, Westi fell between DUCS and the considerably more process-bound CICS.
Development
Pittsburgh
Steve Robert O'Donnell wrote the original DOS 2260 package, which was distributed free of charge. Its popularity made Westinghouse realize Westi had potential as a commercial product.
Columbus
In 1972, IBM released
Paris
Westinghouse Marketing suffered a schism about the same time, and the result was that Europe established an independent subsidiary, Westinghouse Electric Management Systems, SA, or WEMSSA, headquartered in Paris. At that point, the Westinghouse product line, WDU and WESTI, bifurcated, taking independent development paths.
Orlando
The original development team moved to Orlando, Florida, where it eventually came under the management of Dr. Ray Ferguson and focused on integration with VSE and matching features with CICS.
Avignon
WEMSSA, under the direction of Eric Lutaud, contracted with GOAL Systems and eventually developer Leigh Lundin (author of DUCS Remote) for development, which focused on adding remote teleprocessing in Avignon, France. The result was WestiTAM, a 4k bi-sync module, which the Florida group expressed an interest in.
In 1978, WEMSSA resumed relations with the Florida group and eventually the two merged, coming under the new director of WEMSSA in London, David Hazlewood. Westinghouse committed to remerging the product line, re-engineering new products under the direction of Dr. Ferguson and Leigh Lundin. However, part way into development, Westinghouse began to break up the division during the outsourcing thrust of the Reaganomics era. Through badly managed negotiations, Westinghouse ended up with neither developers or outsourcing partners, which spelled the end for one of the industries foremost software groups.
Marketing
References
- ^ Horowitz, Ellis; Hollies, Robert (1981). A Study of the Computer Software Products Industry (PDF). International Conference on Information Systems.
The leading TP-monitor product today is IBM's CICS, and among the competitors WESTI from Westinghouse Electric holds the major share
- ISSN 0010-4841,
The shop decided to switch from CICS to Westinghouse's Westi communications monitor about the time it changed mainframes, Reeps said. "We feel [the Westinghouse product] is more appropriate to our size and less core-expensive", he explained. Westi occupies 24K in the [360/]40, half as much as CICS took on the [370/]135, he said.