ilan343@violet.berkeley.edu (Geraldo Veiga) (06/13/91)
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?
andyc@bucky.intel.com (Andy Crump) (06/13/91)
>>>>> On 13 Jun 91 06:43:53 GMT, ilan343@violet.berkeley.edu (Geraldo Veiga) said:
Geraldo> Has anyone ever heard of Consensys?
No, but that doesn't mean they are not for real.
Geraldo> How much of PC-AT architecture specific code is included in AT&T's
Geraldo> licensed source? I mean boring things like support for ESDI, SCSI, VGA
Geraldo> cards and so on. Did ESIX, ISC, DELL and UHC write their own device
Geraldo> drivers?
ESDI, SCSI, VGA are all included in the source for the Intel386(TM)
microprocessor on the PC-AT platform. The distributors of SVR4 such
as ISC, DELL, UHC, ESIX, Microport, and others (too many to mention
here) have added drivers and other enhancements to SVR4 as distributed
from UNIX System Laboratories. But there is indeed a great deal of
support for the Intel386 processor and the PC-AT platform. Intel is
making sure of that...
*Intel386 is a trademark of Intel Corporation.
--
-- Andy Crump
...!tektronix!reed!littlei!andyc | andyc@littlei.intel.com
...!uunet!littlei!andyc | andyc@littlei.uu.net
Disclaimer: Any opinions expressed here are my own and
not representive of Intel Corportation.cpcahil@virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill) (06/14/91)
ilan343@violet.berkeley.edu (Geraldo Veiga) writes: >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? All of the 386 UNIX (note that I say UNIX, not Xenix) products come from the same AT&T port which provided support for a select group of AT bus hardware. Most, if not all, have added functionality to the drivers, OS and/or applications. -- Conor P. Cahill (703)430-9247 Virtual Technologies, Inc. uunet!virtech!cpcahil 46030 Manekin Plaza, Suite 160 Sterling, VA 22170
larryp@sco.COM (Larry Philps) (06/14/91)
In <ANDYC.91Jun13112037@bucky.intel.com> andyc@bucky.intel.com (Andy Crump) writes: > >>>>> On 13 Jun 91 06:43:53 GMT, ilan343@violet.berkeley.edu (Geraldo Veiga) said: > > Geraldo> Has anyone ever heard of Consensys? > > No, but that doesn't mean they are not for real. Consensys is based here in Toronto. They have some good people working for them including a good friend of mine. They have been in business quite a few years now (5+ years), and have been catering to the high performance peripherals market in PC class machines. That is they design and build high performance hardware, then write drivers to take advantage of that hardware. I had just heard a rumor they started to sell SVR4, I would *guess* that the reason is so they can add drivers and change other OS specific things to take maximum advantage of their groovy hardware. Disclaimer: I have not seen or tested any of their SVR4 stuff, but do have a lot of respect for the hardware/software people who work for them. --- Larry Philps, SCO Canada, Inc. Postman: 130 Bloor St. West, 10th floor, Toronto, Ontario. M5S 1N5 InterNet: larryp@sco.COM or larryp%scocan@uunet.uu.net UUCP: {uunet,utcsri,sco}!scocan!larryp Phone: (416) 922-1937
pjh@mccc.edu (Pete Holsberg) (06/15/91)
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.
=
=Has anyone ever heard of Consensys?
I have one of their ESDI caching hard disk controllers. Works very
well. Better than their customer support! Case in point: I've been
trying to get up-to-date docs and device drivers for this controller for
months without success. They're very nice on the phone when you can get
an answer, but they are short on following up.
Pete
--
Prof. Peter J. Holsberg Mercer County Community College
Voice: 609-586-4800 Engineering Technology, Computers and Math
FAX: 609-586-6944 1200 Old Trenton Road, Trenton, NJ 08690
Internet: pjh@mccc.edu TCF 92 - April ??-??, 1992nlane@well.sf.ca.us (Nathan D. Lane) (06/15/91)
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
larry@nstar.rn.com (Larry Snyder) (06/17/91)
ilan343@violet.berkeley.edu (Geraldo Veiga) writes: >features. Is this for real? Is any part of NeWS part of SysV R4? yes - I was under the idea the NeWS was shipped with all SVR4 licenses -- Larry Snyder, NSTAR Public Access Unix 219-289-0287/317-251-7391 HST/PEP/V.32/v.32bis/v.42bis regional UUCP mapping coordinator {larry@nstar.rn.com, ..!uunet!nstar.rn.com!larry}
evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) (06/19/91)
In article <25465@well.sf.ca.us> nlane@well.sf.ca.us (Nathan D. Lane) writes: >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. >>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'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. Consensys is indeed headquartered in Canada, but also has a good-sized U.S. office in Universal City, Texas. We were approached to be one of their UNIX resellers back in December, but have decided (for now) to continue to stick with ESIX. Here's the best I can make of it (probably 50% first-hand, 50% conjecture): Consensys wants very much to be a major player among 80x86 UNIX peripherals vendors. Their existing products include serial port boards, caching ESDI disk controllers, and TEAC (cassette-style) backup tape units. For whatever reasons (on the surface, to make sure their S4 drivers worked properly), the company bought an R4 source license. So someone thought (pure conjecture here), "let's pay the little bit extra that allows us to resell R4, since we've plowed so much money into this source license already." As far as I've been told (by them), this is likely the LEAST changed R4 of any of the present vendors. The only things that has been added to the pure AT&T release are drivers for Consensys' own boards. The product itself is deliberately designed to be bare bones. No docs outside of release notes and installation -- the rest is the Prentice Hall R4 set. I don't believe the company will do much of its own development work, or supply any bug fixes except what it gets from AT&T. The company wants desparately to get away from selling to end users (and low-volume resellers), as it just doesn't have the staff (sales *or* support) to deal with lots of calls. Their intention is that by only selling the packages in minimum quantity five, they'll avoid dealing with the unwashed masses, but that resellers would find the price too attractive to pass up. That's where Arrow gets involved, to sell the single orders. It's still a good price, but I'll prefer to pay a little more to stick with the good relationship I've had with ESIX. Others may find the bare bones approach more attractive. -- Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario evan@telly.on.ca / uunet!attcan!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504 "MS-DOS 4.0 was a ... learning experience" - Bill Gates, introducing DOS 5
cmf851@anu.oz.au (Albert Langer) (06/20/91)
In article <285F4D54.110F@telly.on.ca> evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch) quotes others and 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. >The product itself is deliberately designed to be bare bones. No docs >outside of release notes and installation -- the rest is the Prentice >Hall R4 set. I don't believe the company will do much of its own >development work, or supply any bug fixes except what it gets from AT&T. >The company wants desparately to get away from selling to end users (and >low-volume resellers), as it just doesn't have the staff (sales *or* support) >to deal with lots of calls. Their intention is that by only selling the >packages in minimum quantity five, they'll avoid dealing with the unwashed >masses, but that resellers would find the price too attractive to pass up. >That's where Arrow gets involved, to sell the single orders. > >It's still a good price, but I'll prefer to pay a little more to stick >with the good relationship I've had with ESIX. Others may find the bare >bones approach more attractive. Sounds attractive to me. Free support from the net seems more worthwhile than paying resellers in advance and hoping anyway. Only thing that worries me is the "extra". Can one easily put together the missing bits from free offerings on the net? I gather X386 solves the X-Window problem and I assume that include files must be provided just for kernel reconfiguration - how long before gnu amounts to an adequate development environment (and is anybody planning to hurry along the necessary libraries in order to take advantage of these "bare bones" offers)? How about networking? Is that easily covered from the stuff available on the net? I'm seriously interested in the advantages of SVR4386 at that price (especially being able to port lots of BSDish software from the net with less hassles). Are there 4 others out there and/or anybody willing to play "reseller". I wouldn't like to try and provide the missing bits by myself. Are there others out there willing to work together on putting out a "release tape" with both source and binaries of everything needed to make this offer fully competitive with the others available. (Perhaps including some neatly indexed newsgroup FAQs and messages as "support"). Two problems though. a) I would like 4.0.3 (and subsequent upgrades at nominal cost). b) I would like to be able to add VP/ix or similar for a reasonable surcharge. (Can one use the 3.2 version?) -- Opinions disclaimed (Authoritative answer from opinion server) Header reply address wrong. Use cmf851@csc2.anu.edu.au
peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) (06/21/91)
ilan343@violet.berkeley.edu (Geraldo Veiga): > Geraldo> Has anyone ever heard of Consensys? andyc@bucky.intel.com (Andy Crump): > No, but that doesn't mean they are not for real. Don't they make a multiport serial card? -- Peter da Silva; Ferranti International Controls Corporation; +1 713 274 5180; Sugar Land, TX 77487-5012; `-_-' "Have you hugged your wolf, today?"