sjm@dayton.UUCP (sjm) (09/19/86)
I remember reading about an operating system called S1 that sounded very interesting. (It had multi-tasking and everything Unix people would like). Has anyone heard anything about it lately? Where can I get more information about it? -- Steven J. McDowall Dayton-Hudson Dept. Store. Co. UUCP: ihnp4!rosevax!dayton!sjm 700 on the Mall ATT: 1 612 375 2816 Mpls, Mn. 55408
ron@brl-sem.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>) (09/24/86)
Hopefully it is dead. The problem is there was probably going to be as much demand for it as another version of UNIX. Essentially, S1 was to be an operating system like UNIX, but was going to fix all those problems with UNIX. It was promised to be running on a wide range of processors, but seemed to be vaporware since no one ever saw it. John Little (from Planet-10...whoops sorry, Multiple Solutions) got the oppurtunity to publish a whole list of reasons why UNIX was bad and how S1 was going to be much better. You could divide them clearly into two categories. First, things that were purposefully not done in UNIX, that we UNIX types really don't want, for example: file typing, built in record access...etc... Second, he listed a very large number of problems that don't even exist in UNIX, and in most cases either never existed or were fixed long before Mr. Littlemind could spell UNIX. Included in this was the statement that UNIX would never be usable on multiprocessors. We have this quote glued to the front of our Dual-780. A paper on how to do multiprocessor UNIX was published at the Naval Postgraduate School in 1975. Unfortunately, they had to build multiprocessors out of individual PDP-11's and hence, it was never really popular, but did form the basis of later multiprocessor UNIX design.