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From: nlane@well.sf.ca.us (Nathan D. Lane)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
Subject: Re: CONSENSYS SysV R4
Message-ID: <25465@well.sf.ca.us>
Date: 15 Jun 91 04:20:29 GMT
References: <1991Jun13.064353.16334@agate.berkeley.edu>
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA
Lines: 56

In article <1991Jun13.064353.16334@agate.berkeley.edu> ilan343@violet.berkeley.edu (Geraldo Veiga) writes:
>This week's UNIX Today has a full page add for Consensys announcing
>their 386/486 SysV R4.  $395 for an unlimited license (in quantities of
>5).  Development system, networking and X-Window are extra.
>
>Now for the odd part.  The X-Window package includes NeWS as one its
>features.  Is this for real?  Is any part of NeWS part of SysV R4?  
>I am sure the PostScript engine is not included.
>
>The add has this fake news column explaining the product, it closes
>with the following:
>
>"UNIX is becoming a standard product, so why pay a lot of extra money
>to people who pretend otherwise?"  
>
>I wish this could actually be true.  The add implies that Consensys is
>passing to their customers the same code that they get from AT&T or
>whoever else licenses SysV source.
>
>Questions:
>
>Has anyone ever heard of Consensys?
>
>How much of PC-AT architecture specific code is  included in AT&T's
>licensed source?  I mean boring things like support for ESDI, SCSI, VGA
>cards and so on.  Did ESIX, ISC, DELL and UHC write their own device
>drivers?


One of our customers brought this add in asking us "if we could beat the
price," i.e., sell our unix for $395.00.  We were quite excited to see such
a low price on Unix and immediately called Consensys.  The first thing the
salesguy asked was "Would you like to buy one of our 8-port serial boards?"
These are the people that make eight port intelligent boards and the
"Head Optimizer" disk drive defragmenter program for Unix.  I asked about
their Unix and they kind of said "uhhh... yes...uhh..we do..uhhh..call
our distributor, Arrow Electronics.."  Otherwise known as, they really didn't
want to sell it to us.  I also found out the prices on all the extras.
I will compare their release to Esix, because that is what I sell, though
other systems are comparable.  They wanted $245 for the X-Windows, $395 for
the Development System, $395 for the networking (I believe).  However, again,
they told me to go through Arrow Electronics, where the prices were
significantly higher.  Arrow wanted to provide us with a "networking
solution."
I'm getting long-winded - so the long and short - I don't think Consensys
really wants to support this product themselves and I would not buy unless
you buy from a reseller who is going to support the product.  It seems
like almost a scam to me, but I don't want to start anything.  I invite
anyone to try them out, but we don't want to sink $2000.00 into five
copies of a Unix that we may not want to support (they wouldn't let us
buy just one copy for evaluation, despite the fact we wanted to become a
reseller for them.)
If anyone else has any experiences with them, I'd like to know.
Thanks

-Nathan Lane