More on UTS/V

[Alan Crosswell]

I just received a "flip book" from Amdahl marketing.  I guess they got the
idea from those Italian/Polish joke books that were around when I was a kid.
Anyhow,  one side is a UTS/V release description and the other is a UTS/V
communications guide.  The documentation is quite good although it is missing
a few pieces.

Some highlights from the book and from conversations with an Amdahl marketeer
that I haven't seen on this bboard are:

- Source (almost)
	The fine print in the UTS/V release description is that you  get
	almost all the source with a source license.  They have declared
	a piece of the kernel (don't know which piece) and part of the C
	compiler (I would guess it's the code generator) as Amdahl Trade
	Secret.  I  sure  hope neither  one  of those  pieces  breaks...

- Languages
	C, F77, Pascal.  These all use the same code generator which is 
	quite good.  Amdahl Pascal is new with UTS/V and replaces Pascal-8000 
	which was ported from MVS.

- Source Licensing
	You need both a System V Release 2 and Documentor's Workbench Source 
	license to get source since AT&T unbundled a whole bunch of stuff.
	Also,  stuff like learn that used to be there is now missing.  You have
	to purchase Instructional Workbench from AT&T.  There are one or two
	other pieces like this that used to be in UTS that are not in UTS/V
	(blame AT&T).

- Document Sources
	A lot of the documentation from the /usr/doc directory is no longer
	provided machine readable.  All the man pages are.

- Communications
	UTS/F is a seperate product which is a set of modifications to the
	EP software for a IBM 3705 communcations front end (aka Amdahl 4705).
	UTS/F provides full-duplex ASCII terminal support.  With UTS/F
	you get to use uucp and cu.

	They have implemented the RJE package which makes UTS/V look like 
	a IBM 360 remote job entry station.

	Also,  RSCS support was referred to as being in the next section
	of the chapter.  Unfortunately the next section is missing,  so
	either they dropped the RSCS emulation or dropped the section from
	the book.  Hence,  I have no idea if it is DMTVMB (VM to VM bisync)
	or NJE,  the Network Job Entry protocol which supplants DMTVMB in
	Version 2 of IBM's RSCS.

- Comparison Chart
	A 3 column chart lists all Sys V, UTS/V, and UTS 2.x commands.  I 
	found this to be a very useful pre-conversion guide.

I suggest that if you are seriously considering UTS/V or IX/370 that you obtain
this flip book from Amdahl and make your own determination.  They are located
in Sunnyvale, CA if you want to get the phone number.

Alan Crosswell
Columbia University
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