Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!cbatt!ucbvax!sdcsvax!darrell
From: darrell@sdcsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: mod.os
Subject: Re: Information please: 'S1'
Message-ID: <2838@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU>
Date: Mon, 9-Mar-87 20:02:24 EST
Article-I.D.: sdcsvax.2838
Posted: Mon Mar  9 20:02:24 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Mar-87 20:30:05 EST
Sender: darrell@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU
Lines: 32
Approved: mod-os@sdcsvax.uucp

In article <2827@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU>, andrew@stl.stc.co.uk (Andrew Macpherson) writes:
> Beyond the name, and a fourth hand comment attributed to a German CS
> researcher (I don't even know which) that 'S1' is the coming thing, I
> know nothing.  Any pointers to literature, or reviews by users would be
> a help.
> 
The S1 operating system is a (claimed) product of Multi Soulutions Inc.
Essentially, it's a vegomatic vaporware operating system which supposedly
fixes the (so-called) deficiencies in UNIX such as lack of a record-oriented
file type.  I haven't heard from them in a while, but when they were active
all they seem to do is sit around and malign UNIX and say how great and worderful
S1 was going to be and that it was going to run on anything.  I have never
found a single product that uses it.  I have doubts that if it does exist
that it ever worked well.

The president of the company John Littlemind (from the Planet X) wrote a
"opposing viewpoint" article in an Electronics feature on UNIX a few years
back.  What was really amazing about his rebuttal was that the problems he
cited had either never existed in UNIX, or had been fixed in standard versions
of UNIX that way predated the article.  For example, he indicated that UNIX
could never work in a multiprocessor enviroment where the processors were
doing equal shares of the work rather than having one CPU and relegating
trivial I/O tasks.  I thought that was so amusing that the quote was glued
to the front of our Dual Processor VAX 780 (Purdue-mods) running 4.2.  The
original strategy for multiprocessor UNIX was layed out in 1975 in a paper
at the Naval Postgraduate School, which was long before John, or most people
could spell UNIX.

What is especially distressing, is that there is a architecture research
project developing a computer called "S1" which is much more creditable.

-Ron