Re: OT: CPL on LCM systems [was Re: COBOL will outlive us all]

[Al Kossow]

On 2/27/13 7:01 AM, jmfbahciv wrote:
> Al Kossow wrote:
>> On 2/26/13 8:30 AM, Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote:
>>
>>> John Xenakis
>>>
>>> (Xenakis was the author of the COPYFILE "compiler" among other things
>>> and was known as "Captain Midnight". Tom Rosato began calling him that
>>> because Xenakis was in the habit of working all night and then leaving
>>> lists of the new features in CMS taped to his colleagues' doors where
>>> they'd find them when they got to work in the morning.)
>>>
>>> ... snip ...
>>
>>> there was mad rush to get stuff back into the 370 product pipelines
>>> (hardware & software). The head of POK also managed to convince
>>> corporate to kill vm370, shutdown the Burlington group and move all the
>>> people to POK (or otherwise MVS/XA wouldn't ship on schedule some 7-8
>>> yrs later) ... Endicott managed to save the vm370 product mission but
>>> had to reconstitute a group from scratch.
>>>
>>> There was a strategy to not inform the Burlington group of the shutdown
>>> and move, until the last possible moment (in order to minimize the
>>> number of people that might escape). However, the rumor of the shutdown
>>> managed to leak ... and some number of people managed to escape the move
>>> (joke that head of POK was one of the largest contributors to
>>> vax/vms). The last couple of months at Burlington there was witch hunt
>>> to find out who leaked the information (fortunately for me, nobody gave
>>> up the person responsible).
>>>
>>
>>
>> And the circle is complete.
>>
>> Some have argued that the influx of IBM'ers was what started the
> transformation
>> of "DEC" into "Digital", abandoning their original customer base to try and
>> compete with IBM in the commercial world. From what I have read, one of the
>> failures of Jupiter was because the architects tried to build a PDP-10 the
> way
>> you would build a 370, and failed to recognize that the instruction set
> can't
>> be pipelined the same way.
>>
>>
>
> Yup. More importantly, the IBMers obeyed their superiors so they never
> knew when to ignore Gordong Bell. He made corporate speech which
> caused those IBM middle managers to cancel all work that had anything
> to do with non-VMS projects. The PDP-10 product line didn't learn
> about any of this until a month or two after these managers stopped
> the funding for projects. When we thought people up north were working
> on something, they had already been reassigned and funded to do something
> purely VMSish.
>
> Your post is one of the things I never talked about because I didn't
> know the status of the information.
>
> /BAH
>

It is mostly available in corporate memos in the DEC corporate archive now at
the Computer History Museum. The part that wasn't obvious is tracing back how
many of the key players were ex-IBM. I suspect this will be someone's doctoral
thesis in the history of technology some time in the future. I'll leave it to
them to write this all up :-)

also, added alt.sys.pdp10 so that someone might see this in the archives some day
rather than being buried in AFC.

[jmfbahciv]

I can tell you that, for the Jupiter, one. The rest were middle managers
who were unmemorable.

> I suspect this will be someone's doctoral
> thesis in the history of technology some time in the future. I'll leave it
to
> them to write this all up :-)

An interesting one would be to notice which VPs were kept. Those who
had been with DEC for a long time, knew what the future would be like
just by the fact that Compaq kept the jerks and got rid of the productive.

>
> also, added alt.sys.pdp10 so that someone might see this in the archives
some day
> rather than being buried in AFC.

Congrats on figuring it out. I've been waiting for someone to do that :-).

/BAH