Published in AustralianIT, July 30 2003

FORGET Linux running on the Xbox; how about OS/400 running on the PlayStation?

Despite sounding ridiculously improbable, IBM does in fact have a research team porting its enterprise operating system to Sony's market-leading games console.

"I'm still looking forward to seeing OS/400 running on a PlayStation," said Dr Frank Soltis, iSeries chief scientist for IBM. "I'm not sure there's a big market, but we're working on it."

Sadly for gaming fans with an enterprise bent, there's absolutely no chance that the product will escape from IBM's Rochester laboratory and into their consoles. The project is being undertaken as part of the research associated with IBM's joint development project with Toshiba and Sony to develop processors for entertainment and other applications.

Although game consumers have a rather different set of demands to enterprise managers, the processors developed under the deal will be based on IBM's POWER architecture, which is also used in the iSeries machines which run OS/400.

"There's a common architecture there, so it's not a particularly difficult process," Dr Soltis said.