Marketing Unix/ S1/ Pick and everything

[Eugene Miya]

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First, I would like to thank those people who sent or post suggestions.
Scott is right, you just can't write about it.  Dr. Perlman made the best
suggestion: make a video tape, I agree, but we have too few video tape drives
that this rules this out for the time.  I have to keep the Q&A format for my
"marketing memos."

Like others, I have followed the S1 (and the early Pick) discussion.  I think
than based on the past history of the development of operating systems,
CP/M, MS/DOS, VMS/RSX, we see these operating systems moving closer and closer
to what we regard as UNIX.  Multiple processes have been added, hierarchical
file systems (in VMS), HLL (in VMS) development language for the OS.
I suspect these and other (4.2) features will eventually evolve their way
into S1 and Pick.  (Maybe some of their features will work their way into
UNIX (Note Multics and TOPS-20 features).

What I am wondering, from the more hard core wizards reading this
light weight list: if we define UNIX as a set of system calls, then
if a system comes along which uses a different HLL (Higher Level Language)
than C, something other than fork()-wait(), creat()-open()-close()-read()-
write()-lseek(), mkdir()-rmdir-chdir(), and so on, is this UNIX?  Is
it UNIX-like?  In the case of the ELXSI EMBOS system: "Is it UNIX
without 'grep'?"

--eugene miya
  NASA Ames Res. Ctr.