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Further reading □ Overview46. Start of 198447. Hardware48. PNX49. Software50. Assessment51. User Support52. SUSSG53. Critique of 1984/5
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ACDSingle User SystemsPERQ HistoryPart VIII
ACDSingle User SystemsPERQ HistoryPart VIII
ACL ACD C&A INF CCD CISD Archives
Further reading

Overview
46. Start of 1984
47. Hardware
48. PNX
49. Software
50. Assessment
51. User Support
52. SUSSG
53. Critique of 1984/5

1984/5

51. USER SUPPORT

51.1 Support Office

A Support Office had been established in 1983 and continued throughout 1984. By November 1984, there were 180 systems to support and there had been 560 queries of varying degrees of complexity during the year. With only a limited amount of effort available, it was possible to answer all the straightforward queries but limited time could be spent on ones requiring several days of detailed analysis. Consequently, the depth of support was not as good as we would have liked.

51.2 PERQ News

PERQ News, issued by QMC as a joint Computer Board/SERC newsletter, continued to be produced during 1984.

51.3 European PERQ User Group Meeting - July 1984

This was a two-day meeting open to all European PERQ users.

ICL gave an update of the status of PNX and future developments. The major concern from the user community outside SERC was the fact that ICL was assuming 16K WCS in future software enhancements and many users would have difficulty finding the money to upgrade their systems at this stage in their life.

ICL announced that 2,000 PERQ systems had been shipped, with a further 1,000 being shipped in the next year. ICL made a formal commitment to Newcastle Connection but made no announcement of PERQ3.

Brian Rosen from Three Rivers (now called PERQ Systems Corporation) gave an entertaining and optimistic view of progress from the USA point of view. He made it clear that PNX would not be marketed in the USA. Three Rivers were supplying ACCENT as the basic distributed operating system. The company had grown to 250 people with 70,000 sq ft of office space and 5 sales offices across the USA. They had secured $10M new funds in the last year and were buoyantly optimistic about the future.

The joint effort put in on the new ACCENT operating system was over 100 man years and it was the way forward as far as Three Rivers were concerned. Whether ICL would go the same route had not been decided. The talk was irresponsible as Three Rivers had still not got good performance out of ACCENT. It did nothing to help user confidence in the future of PNX.

RAL had kept contact with the ACCENT developments, attending the CMU Industrial Affiliates meeting in May 1984. Although there was considerable progress on ACCENT and SPICE, it was clear that CMU were not committed to PERQs and the new strong involvement with IBM meant that most software was being ported to SUN systems purchased by IBM for the project. James Gosling and David Rosenthal were both involved in the window management developments. In just over a year's time Three Rivers were to go close to bankruptcy and SUN would employ both James Gosling and David Rosenthal alongside Warren Teitelman, thus having the most powerful user interface team of the single user system companies.

The remainder of the EPUG meeting concentrated on users' experiences. Parallel sessions were held with strong interest in the use of the PERQ in the documentation and publishing area, CAD/CAM (schematics and finite element analysis), and expert systems where the user interface was seen as a significant advantage. Twelve companies exhibited products on the PERQ and it was, in general, a successful meeting.

51.4 User Forum - September 1984

The SERC User Forum had about 80 people attending. The meeting had been delayed until sufficient people had had experience of PNX2. 0 for a useful interchange of comments and criticisms.

Overall, users' reactions to PNX2. 0 were generally favourable and the early indications were that the software was becoming right and PNX4/5 would make the PERQ an effective system.

A number of Extra Mural Contracts had been placed by RAL with universities for specific pieces of software. The University of Kent had contracts to improve the debugging environment on the PERQ and to provide a set of tools to help FORTRAN programmers. Peter Brown gave a presentation of oops, a screen oriented debugger, and guide, a documentation system, both of which would later be made available to the user community.

There was a GKS Tutorial on the previous day and, the general view was one of optimism, compared with earlier meetings.

51.5 European PERQ User Group - July 1985

This meeting was well attended with over 100 attendees for the two days. The majority of delegates were from the UK but participation also came from Norway, Belgium, West Germany, Netherlands and France.

By this time almost all SERC users were running PNX. However, the overall position in the ICL market was that 50% of the sites were still running POS and causing ICL to split its effort between the two systems.

PNX5 was expected within the next few weeks and most people running PNX were now on to PNX4 if they had PERQ2s.

The ICL PERQ community was now 80% commercial and only 20% academic or scientific. Consequently, the support activity was becoming broader.

ICL made it clear that they were committed to UNIX on the PERQ and to track AT&T developments. The joint X/OPEN announcement with five other major European manufacturers provide a common application interface to UNIX systems provided by the various companies thus ensuring that applications available on one system would run on all.

CAD, text and document production, software development environment were still the major application areas. Again there was a small exhibition of nine companies demonstrating software on the PERQ.

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