Tandem Presence at the US DECUS Symposium in Providence, Rhode Island
Larry Kilgallen
analogous to ITUG. The semi-annual US DECUS Symposium was held this week
in Providence Rhode Island.
There were about 7 Tandem sessions, and the two that I attended were lightly
enough attended that we got to deviate a bit onto what the audience wanted
rather than what was on the prepared slides. They were pushing Windows NT
as a development environment, while as someone with no Tandem experience I
was more interest in hearing about command line development tools directly
on the NSK machine.
There was also an excellent Public Key Infrastructure given by someone
from Atalla (who has only been there 8 months). It was not clear from
the program that the session was not from Houston, so I was much more
favorably impressed than I anticipated. Perhaps today's executive
reorganization at Compaq (if they stick to it) will result in some
sort of distinctive style for "enterprise" information as distinguished
from "pc" information.
The Trade Show at the DECUS Symposium had the Compaq stuff in one
large booth (50*50 ?) with "arms" reaching out in about 6 directions.
The space between one pair of arms was devoted to Himalaya hardware,
particularly showing off ServerNet.
There was no NSK presence in the "Technology Center", where there was
a lot of traditional DEC gear (and some Compaq PCs) set up with technical
folk to demonstrate software point products or technology projects, like
VMS Galaxy (to cite one example Tandem users may have heard about). The
lack of NSK in that area may have been appropriate this time, since the
crowd lacked enough Tandem background to have provided any challenging
questions on NSK.
Vendors who exhibited in the Trade Show had a much less formal than
usual opportunity to sign up for booth space one year hence, with the
description being that it was "tentative for early June" and "in the
Northeast" pending the results of DECUS-ITUG merger activities. To my
mind even if DECUS and ITUG don't merge by then, they could still hold
a joint US conference.
Larry Kilgallen