S1 really does live!!!

[Ron Natalie]

My favorite thing about S1 is how they degrade UNIX.  I have a quote
from John Littlemind the president of Multisolutions that was printed
in Electronics magazines issue on UNIX.  He is detailing what is wrong
with UNIX.  Most of the inadequacies he cites have been fixed even in
the less progressive AT&T releases.  The quote we have is the one saying
that using UNIX in a multiprocessor environment is impossible due to
inherenct deciencies in it's design.  The quote is glued to the front of
our Purdue style dual VAX running 4.2 BSD using both CPU's.  The machine
sits accros the room from the Gould PN/6080 also running UNIX on two
CPU's.  I think someone should tell Convergent and Denelcor and all those
other people that they can't do multiprocessor UNIX (they didn't know
it was impossible when they did it).  Doing multiple CPU UNIX has been
known since 1975 (back before John could probably spell UNIX) where the
Naval Postgraduate School published a paper on the subject.  Unfortunately
back then there wasn't any good machine to use for multiprocessor work.
The modifications to the 4.2 Kernel to support the second CPU is minimal,
the hardest part being what you have to do the VAX to get the second CPU
running rather than what you have to do the the UNIX CPU to support multiple
CPUs.


-Ron

S1:  It slices, it dices, it makes jullienne fries, but you've got to
hit that sucker just right.