CONSENSYS SysV R4

[Evan Leibovitch]

In article <25465 at well.sf.ca.us> nlane at well.sf.ca.us (Nathan D. Lane) writes:
>In article <1991Jun13.064353.16334 at agate.berkeley.edu> ilan343 at 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 at telly.on.ca / uunet!attcan!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504
 "MS-DOS 4.0 was a ... learning experience" - Bill Gates, introducing DOS 5