What ever happened to S1

[Ron Natalie <ron>]

Hopefully it is dead.  The problem is there was probably going to
be as much demand for it as another version of UNIX.  Essentially,
S1 was to be an operating system like UNIX, but was going to fix all
those problems with UNIX. It was promised to be running on a wide range
of processors, but seemed to be vaporware since no one ever saw it.
John Little (from Planet-10...whoops sorry, Multiple Solutions) got the
oppurtunity to publish a whole list of reasons why UNIX was bad and how
S1 was going to be much better.  You could divide them clearly into two
categories.

First, things that were purposefully not done in UNIX, that we UNIX
types really don't want, for example: file typing, built in record
access...etc...

Second, he listed a very large number of problems that don't even
exist in UNIX, and in most cases either never existed or were fixed
long before Mr. Littlemind could spell UNIX.  Included in this was
the statement that UNIX would never be usable on multiprocessors.
We have this quote glued to the front of our Dual-780.  A paper on
how to do multiprocessor UNIX was published at the Naval Postgraduate
School in 1975.  Unfortunately, they had to build multiprocessors
out of individual PDP-11's and hence, it was never really popular,
but did form the basis of later multiprocessor UNIX design.