O'pain Software Foundation: (2) Why is it better than AT&T?

[Chris Lewis]

In article <5085 at nsc.nsc.com> glennw at nsc.UUCP (Glenn Weinberg) writes:
>I never, ever, thought I'd see the day when the great majority of people
>on Usenet would come to the opinion that AT&T had their best interests
>at heart!  I continue to be amazed at how so many people are just gobbling
>up the AT&T corporate line on the effects of OSF on the Unix* market.

I find it even harder to accept that (by inference) that anything IBM 
is involved in has our best interests at heart either.

Speaking as one who has worked for IBM in C language definition, I have
a few points:

	- All appearances to the contrary, IBM has been firmly against
	  UNIX since the mid seventies.  You see, they have these major
	  mid and mainframes to flog, and UNIX just cuts into that market.
	  Even though they've built, or have had built for them, at least 
	  a dozen variants of UNIX, only two or three have ever seen the 
	  light of day, and customers are discouraged as much as possible 
	  from using them (eg: IX/370, VM/IX etc.).  They'd much rather
	  UNIX just simply quietly fade away.  Many times in the past IBM
	  has announced that they have taken steps to change this.  Nothing
	  much ever happened (with the minor exception of A/IX).
	  
	  Why should this time be any different?  I'll believe it when I 
	  see it.

	- IBM believes only in standards that they invent.  I mean, who
	  else uses EBCDIC?  And they can't even agree on what version of
	  EBCDIC for crying out loud.  
	  
	- As part of the C definition group we were under a great deal 
	  of pressure to customize C divergent from ANSI:  Enum 
	  cardinality operators, language tie-ins to graphics subsystems, 
	  language tie-ins so that you could call BASIC subroutines etc.  
	  Not functions, but language modifications!  Not nearly as simple as 
	  "fortran", "basic", or "rpg"  keywords, but a complete revision of 
	  function/variable implementation and definition syntax.

	  Yes, IBM had (this was in the 83/84 timeframe) a representative 
	  on the ANSI C Standards Committee.  Some rep.  Had about 3 
	  weeks exposure with C.  No programming.  What a jerk.  As far 
	  as I could tell, he was fresh out of high school - he would never
	  once give me a straight answer what his background was.  He
	  just loved inventing new features to make C look more like
	  some sort of mutant hybrid of Pascal, Ada and Assembler.

	  Out of twelve people in my department (language design centre), 
	  there were only two people (myself and a colleague from a 
	  previous employer) who had *any* background whatsover in 
	  computer languages/compilers/interpreters.  The two of us 
	  with 6-7 years experience, both from University and compiler 
	  building with previous employers were the juniors, the rest 
	  were fresh out of high school or what Americans would call
	  Junior College.  The oldest was 22.  Some of these people 
	  became world-wide "IBM Prime" for the languages we were 
	  working with (Pascal, COBOL, BASIC, RPG, C, FORTRAN) simply 
	  because they had been with IBM a couple of weeks longer.

	  I resisted these changes to C as hard as I could, largely
	  by trying to teach our C rep something about C.  Didn't
	  do any good.

	  However, the presence of experienced people in our department 
	  evoked paranoia on the part of many of the others.  Stories 
	  started to flow.  Eg: my resume was a lie and I didn't have 
	  any University degrees.

	  T'was a really wonderful place to work....  So I left.

	  (Gave some of my friends a chance to stop laughing.)

	  As it turned out, my old department never produced anything -
	  several other colleagues from this same previous employer were in
	  the "back-end" group and gave up on all of the language teams
	  in our dept.  The back-end group built the language specs and 
	  frontends themelves and it's shipping quite nicely thank you.

	  Since the C rep was funded by IBM HQ, they couldn't get rid
	  of him.  So, they eventually made him a manager of his own
	  department (with no underlings) and put him in a closet where
	  he wouldn't bother anybody else.  I think he's still there....

	  You want these guys to define UNIX?

	  [BTW: I have absolutely no complaint with what you might call
	  the "old hands" at IBM.  Whatever their background, they were
	  a joy to work with, and we would come up with combined efforts.  
	  It's the 18 year-olds you have to worry about... :-(]

OSF: a wonderful opportunity for IBM to divide and submerge.  Just like
OS/2-PS/2.
-- 
Chris Lewis, Spectrix Microsystems Inc,
UUCP: {uunet!mnetor, utcsri!utzoo, lsuc, yunexus}!spectrix!clewis
Phone: (416)-474-1955