P-E SysV.2??

[Brent]

At NCC, Perkin-Elmer claimed they would have System V.2 by October.
Well October has come and gone, and none have been shipped.  They
say they'll start shipping them Nov. 2.  When we'll receive ours,
no one can say.

    What is P-E's UNIX strategy?  Following closely in AT&T's steps
is what they appear to be doing with V.2.  To make this work, they 
must either offer a better cost/performance ratio than AT&T, or offer 
something AT&T doesn't.  P-E has strengths in the defense industry.  
This means FORTRAN.  Under their OS/32, they have a super-optimized 
FORTRAN compiler.  There is talk of bringing this over to their UNIX.  
This would continue their concentration in defense.  P-E is also big 
into real-time applications with OS/32.  Not much under their UNIX 
for this, though.  They do have a utility to lock a process in main 
memory, but that's about it.

    What of the business-oriented community?  This is where it gets
strange.  If they are going for the scientific/technical community
as they appear to be doing with FORTRAN, why System V?  4.2 might
have been a better choice, to talk with the VAXen running BSD.  If 
they are going after the UNIX business community, as they appear to 
be doing with Sys V, then why do they have an optimized FORTRAN, and 
no C optimizer?  How many folks running pure Bell UNIX out there 
write your application programs in FORTRAN?  Thank you, I see both
of you raised your hands.

    More later.  We'll see.

-- 
            Brent Laminack  (akgua!itm!brent)