Anyone heard of the S1 Operating System

Paul McJones paul at mcjones.org
Fri Feb 28 14:21:31 CST 2020


Googling for "multisolutions inc. s1 operating system" turned up several mentions from ComputerWorld, an S1 operating system pin at Etsy, plus this blog post:

http://mathisliberalarts.blogspot.com/2012/03/?m=0
> One day at Burroughs I received a phone call from a recruiter.  Usually I don’t give these headhunters the time of day, but this one mentioned a startup company.  It was either intrigue or boredom but I decided to interview. Then I was hired to write compilers which I had been doing for about six years at Burroughs.
> 
> The company was a small startup in Lawrenceville, NJ.  The CTO was a charismatic engineer named Robert Knight.  The CEO was a wealthy businessman, Charles Lombardo, who provided most of the company’s funding.  Somehow, maybe because Lombardo’s wife worked on Wall Street, our tiny company, MultiSolutions Inc., actually went public.  Even though they actually did not have a product or a revenue stream.
> 
> The product, under development, was an Operating System called S1.  The marketing department used the slogan “Unix is a dinosaur, MS-DOS is a toy.”  This was in 1984 and it was true that there was an opportunity for a new OS in the marketplace.
> 
> To kill any suspense, the OS never caught on. ...
> 

Paul


> On Feb 28, 2020, at 10:00 AM, wrcooke at wrcooke.net wrote:
> 
> Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2020 19:20:06 -0600 (CST)
> From: wrcooke at wrcooke.net <mailto:wrcooke at wrcooke.net>
> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org <mailto:cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> Subject: Anyone heard of the S1 Operating System
> 
> Reading through the April 85 issue of Byte, I came across a reference to the "S1 Operating System."  In Jerry Pournelle's column on pg 361 he talks about this mysterious OS.  Here is a small excerpt:
> Robert Knight. formerly of
> Princeton's computer laboratories. is
> an old fan of my books and columns
> as well as the creator of SI. which he
> had running on an IBM Instruments
> CS9000 
> 
> Anyway, my Googling turned up nothing on the OS, although I did find a Robert Knight at Princeton, but no information on stuff he's done.  I will likely email him to ask about it, but wanted to ask here first if anyone knows anything about it.
> 
> Thanks,
> Will



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