The Universal Society of Ethics Religion and Spirituality today made a
pre-release announcement of the Christian Deity Ontological System
version 7.0 (XDOS 7.0), commonly known as Christianity 7. The release
(expected 1 Q '00) is eagerly awaited in many quarters. Analysts have
been predicting the new version on the basis of comparatively poor
performance in recent years against religions from other vendors.

The last major version of Christianity, released in the mid 1750's,
was made primarily active only one day per week, in compliance with
the major social architectures of the day.  The "Sunday School"
feature made it vastly popular. The new "evangelism" module, the most
effective since the "mission" variant of Christianity 3 in the 800's,
made release 6.0 and its variants one of the most powerful programs
available at the time.

Christianity 6.0 was, however, made backward compatible with previous
versions.  5.0 had been targetted at primarily agrarian architectures
and therefore, while the program was structurally compatible with
active users, the program did not disallow passive types. While this
was attractive to users with large volumes of physical input offline,
it was less well suited to a sedentary population. As the social
architecture moved towards more static cycle times, many complained
that Christianity 6 had serious "downtime" problems.

According to the Society's announcement, Christianity 7 will abandon
compatibility of the user interface, although strict data and
functional compatibility will be maintained.  Previous versions were
based primarily on batch input, and users with buffers of insufficient
size often dealt with input problems, due to the lack of an
implemented flow control, by rejecting all input in excess of the
buffer size. This meant that the same batch input could be recycled as
new input several times, and it often was. While this was acceptable
to most users, those with faster platforms found it difficult to deal
with.  Over several releases, many of those wishing greater input had
addressed the matter by "piping" input from several sources at once,
but latterly users had been vociferous in their complaints regarding
the bottleneck, and many simply abandoned the program for systems with
greater input options.

The new user interface is stated to be much more interactive.  As
well, the user will have greater responsibility for the overall
performance of the system.  In the past, most system maintenance was
done either by the vendor or by specially trained system
administrators. As neither the vendors nor the administrators were
able to work directly with applications on the system, requests for
user support were often answered vaguely, if at all. The Society is
calling for more training centres dedicated to user applications
training rather than more training for system administrators. (It is
interesting to note that this type of training was widely available in
the late 1700's and early 1800's; the pinnacle of activity for release
6.)

Because of this radical change in interface, the Society is calling
for assistance from both users and interface design experts in drawing
up the specific features for the layout.  All submissions are to be
directed to:

(c) Robert Slade 1990   (Robert_Slade@mtsg.sfu.ca)