DEC does NOT have an SVID OS

[Greg Pickle]

> I have it on good authority that DEC now has System V Release 3 in their
> price book.  My authority says that the big company he works for asked
> DEC to make it a real product so that the big company could sell it as
> part of a deliverable for a U.S. Gov't dept/agency.  I wouldn't be at
> all surprised if your DEC salesman denies it all.  Sure makes a good
> rumor though, doesn't it!
> -- 
> Ron Heiby, heiby at mcdchg.UUCP	Moderator: comp.newprod & comp.unix
> "Failure is one of the basic Freedoms!" The Doctor (in Robots of Death)


DEC currently sells System V Release 2, but only to ATT and the old Bell
operating companies.  I think they also will sell to other folks in the same
line of business but am not sure where they draw the line.

I was told recently by our local sales rep that DEC has now signed the Sys V
Rel III license.  DEC has a Sys V org of some kind in NJ.  Our local rep has
been quite impressed with their work.  DEC's cluster equipment can be used
with Sys V where it apparently is not yet supported on Ultrix or has just
recently become available.  DEC's Symmetric Multi-Processing stuff was avail-
able for the 8820 series under Sys V the day the machine was announced which
was even before VMS supported it.  SMP will also be available for the 8830 &
8840 before VMS has it. 

Since the OSF announcement it hasn't been possible to get any kind of reliable
information out of the local DEC folks on how their Sys V support is going to
be impacted.  One local rep was told by a national rep that it "was business as
usual".  The local guy and I both thought that was more a pious hope than a
reality.  The impression I got, filtered through experience in a large company,
was that DEC's Sys V org was taken by surprise and perhaps wasn't aware of the
OSF thing before the rest of the world.  As someone from a western DEC lab said
(Brian Reid?), large corporations are not monolithic, and there are often dif-
ferences of opinion between divisions.

Greg Pickle

...!att!inuxc!pickle
...!iuvax!inuxc!pickle

Disclaimer: These are my opinions, not ATT's.