S1 really does live!!!

[Doug Gwyn <gwyn>]

The "S1" marketing makes AT&T's look good by comparison.

[Ron Natalie]

My favorite thing about S1 is how they degrade UNIX. I have a quote
from John Littlemind the president of Multisolutions that was printed
in Electronics magazines issue on UNIX. He is detailing what is wrong
with UNIX. Most of the inadequacies he cites have been fixed even in
the less progressive AT&T releases. The quote we have is the one saying
that using UNIX in a multiprocessor environment is impossible due to
inherenct deciencies in it's design. The quote is glued to the front of
our Purdue style dual VAX running 4.2 BSD using both CPU's. The machine
sits accros the room from the Gould PN/6080 also running UNIX on two
CPU's. I think someone should tell Convergent and Denelcor and all those
other people that they can't do multiprocessor UNIX (they didn't know
it was impossible when they did it). Doing multiple CPU UNIX has been
known since 1975 (back before John could probably spell UNIX) where the
Naval Postgraduate School published a paper on the subject. Unfortunately
back then there wasn't any good machine to use for multiprocessor work.
The modifications to the 4.2 Kernel to support the second CPU is minimal,
the hardest part being what you have to do the VAX to get the second CPU
running rather than what you have to do the the UNIX CPU to support multiple
CPUs.

-Ron

S1: It slices, it dices, it makes jullienne fries, but you've got to
hit that sucker just right.

[Harold Schloss]

I just got a look at the December 84 issue of Systems and Software and
spotted Multi Solutions Inc.'s ad for the S1 operating system. Now I have
received literature from them in the past and always felt that anything they
said had to discounted a little, but this ad is really something else.
I really got a kick out of the Ten Commandments that they had. I think
there may be some form of reasoning behind them so I am including to see if
anyone can come up with rational reasons for them.

1. Thou shalt not have no other operating system before S1
2. Thou shalt not take the name S1 in vain
3. Thou shalt not grep
4. Thou shalt not sag
5. Neither shalt thou ratfor
6. Thou shalt not make thee any uux
7. Neither shalt thou scat
8. Thou shalt not desire xargs
9. Thou shalt not bear false yacc
10. Thou shalt no commit shmop

The ad then goes on to promise that S1 can do just about everything. It is
multiuser, multitasking, has events, has gates, windowing, bit mapped displays,
networkin, DIFFERENT types of files, portable to new chips in 5 months (yea
sure!), 65000 characters in each of an unlimited number of fonts, up to 256
processors, supports any kind of memory managment (!!!?), is modular, and
completely uniform from machine to machine! If they (MSI) can do all this than
why does the Ten Commandments have so many "Thou shalt not ..."? The first
two are just pompous, the rest except for number 9, seem to do away with
some standard UN*X utilities as well as some things I do not recognize.
(So maybe I am a little ignorant about sag, xargs, scat, and shmop.)

So if anyone out there has a rational (you be the judge) set of reasons
for these commandments I would LOVE to hear about them.

--
Hal Schloss
(from the Software Lounge at) Pacesetter Systems Inc.
{trwrb|allegra|burdvax|cbosgd|hplabs|ihnp4|sdcsvax}!sdcrdcf!psivax!woof