rsk@pucc-h (Rich Kulawiec) (09/22/84)
Well, I finally got some info from Multi Solutions; they sent
a copy of the by-now infamous full-page ad; a couple of articles,
(listed below) and a four-page "comparison brochure".
The articles are reprints of:
"A Module Approach to Microcomputer Operating System",
John Little, Computer Design, July 1984.
"An OS that offers everything", John Little, Systems & Software, July 1984.
The articles are not very well-written, and if they contain very nearly the
same material...they also contain some interesting turns of phrase, some of
which caused me to call into question the author's software background.
The four-page brochure is the fun part. It looks like someone took
the last several issues of Systems & Software, Microsystems, and
Computer Design, and pulled every buzzword they could find, and then
decided that S1 would include all of those features.
They claim to be able to read files from CP/M, MP/M II, MS-DOS, Unix,
Xenix, p-System, FLEX, IBM 3741, DEC Files 11, and eleven other systems...
they claim to have Pascal, Fortran, C, Basic, Cobol, Modula2, PL/1, Ada,
Lisp, Snobol....multiuser, multiprocessing, multitasking, mutiple command
interpreters, and so on...
The inside of the brochure has a feature comparison chart, comparing S1
to CP/M, MP/M III, CP/NET, Concurrent CP/M, MS-DOS, Unix, Xenix, FLEX,
Oasis, p-System, and Pick. Every single line, every single feature is
marked "YES" for S1, and there are a lot of "NO"'s for the other systems.
Whoever made the chart was either intentionally misleading, or rather ignorant
of the features of the other OS's; they say, under "Networking", that NO
networking is available under Unix, for instance.
There are a couple of possible scenarios here, as a colleague pointed out:
1. The Multi Solutions marketing people have gone out of control; and the
software engineers cringe every time they (the marketeers) go out the door.
2. There are some hotshot software designers who are creating a system along
design principles not too different from the Ada-include-everything-you-can-
think-of philosophy, and they'll never get it all to work.
Of course, they may just surprise us all and pull this off; but to me,
this sounds very much like a free lunch, and as R. Heilein has pointed out,
there ain't no such thing.
--
---Rsk
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Not fade away...bin@ism780.UUCP (09/26/84)
>There are a couple of possible scenarios here, as a colleague pointed out: > >1. The Multi Solutions marketing people have gone out of control; and the >software engineers cringe every time they (the marketeers) go out the door. > >2. There are some hotshot software designers who are creating a system along >design principles not too different from the Ada-include-everything-you-can- >think-of philosophy, and they'll never get it all to work. There's a third possibility: it could all be an elaborate hoax.