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From: mao@blipyramid.BLI.COM (Mike Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.misc,misc.misc,misc.wanted
Subject: Re: Who are (were) Quantel and what did they make?
Message-ID: <57@blipyramid.BLI.COM>
Date: 22 Dec 87 18:55:14 GMT
References: <1887@phred.UUCP>
Organization: Britton Lee, Inc.
Lines: 38
Summary: not quite 360/370 plug-compatable...

In article <1887@phred.UUCP>, artm@phred.UUCP (Curmudgeon) asks for
information on computer systems made by Qantel (note the spelling).

I worked with one of qantel's boxes for something like six months.  They
build hardware that's incompatable with any other manufacturer's stuff;
the processor, OS, and programming languages are all proprietary.  They
mostly target "vertical markets" -- hotel chains, etc.  They have a sports
management package that prints paychecks for football players and stuff.
I've heard that several of the major-league teams use it.

To the guts:  They provide indexed files at the OS level with some sort
of B-tree management (details are fuzzy, this was a long time ago).  For
slow, simple database management, it's reasonable.  We ran a medical billing
package for a couple of thousand patients, and it was fairly reliable.

Programmers won't especially like the tools made available to them.  Most
of our development was done in Qantel's proprietary Basic, Qicbasic.
(Qantel saves a great deal of money by not using the letter "u" anywhere.)
Cobol is available, but we never ran it.  Their assembler addresses data
very strangely (since numbers are usually BCD-encoded).  There's no stack,
which makes recursion a pretty slick trick (it's not supported by the
assembler, by the way).  The OS is rudimentary; scheduling works only so
long as processes "block" occasionally.  If you write an assembler program

	label:	jmp label

you freeze the system.  If your program contains an illegal instruction,
the machine crashes.  This gets embarassing when you're trying to debug
a new tape-writing utility and people are entering billing data...  The name
of the OS, by the way, is BEST (charming, if not especially convincing).

There's a Qantel distributor somewhere in Seattle you can call for more info.
Check the phone book.  Corporate headquarters is somewhere in Hayward, CA.

					mike olson
					britton lee, inc.
					(...!ucbvax!ucsfcgl!blia!mao)
					(olson@berkeley)