Perkin Elmer running Unix

[utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!unix-wizards]

>From decvax!duke!unc!smb at Berkeley Thu Sep 17 15:32:40 1981
In-real-life: Steven M. Bellovin
Location: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

I had an opportunity to run some tests on a Perkin-Elmer UNIX system a
few months ago, and was rather pleased by it.  The Perkin-Elmer UNIX is
very much a pure V7 -- the Wollongong Group was very careful not to
make any "improvements".  Not that UNIX can't be improved -- but that's
a totally different problem.  The biggest complaint I had about the
system was that the stack was allocated at link time and defaulted to
4K .  And the symptoms of having too small a stack were confusing at
best....

About its I/O bandwidth -- yes, it's excellent, but remember that you
need to have several fast controllers to really use it.  And there was
a curious problem about input characters being lost; I don't know if it
was a KL11-like interface or the incredibly bad feel on the terminal
keyboards -- I'm quite willing to believe it never really sent the
characters I hit.