[FRIAM] the woman behind the woman

[Owen Densmore]

​Unfortunately, my experience w/ IBM whilst at Xerox (1970-78) was that a
small cave of IBM 360s were used in a highly secure building while all the
free spirits were​ using Fortran, Ratfor (Bell labs c-like rational fortran
transpiler), APL, bcpl (on the Altos). We found it easy to work with DEC,
HP, Kodak and other research outfits, but not IBM.

We did have success with them when building a tiny 1Mb ethernet chip ..
which we used in copiers .. the usual ethernets were 10Mb by then. IBM
thought we were crazy. Literally.

And then half-way thru my stay there, TCP/IP exploded on the scene and we
all transferred from our internal PARC suite to it. Took a while to convert
but because we use ethernet from the beginning with home-made protocols,
the conversion wasn't that bad.

In that period, the IBM systems were way slow to join the party. They
preferred various "Star" networks that naturally had a server in the middle.

But that may have been Xerox .. afterall they made the Sigma systems so
those were preferred while the 360s remained behind locked doors. Their
network was sneaker-net with tapes.

When I went to Apple, IBM also literally laughed at Jobs. Ha! Sun also had
difficulty with IBM, they couldn't grok Unix, and "knew better". So we
built proxies to work around them but in isolation.

All this is too bad because they had great tech in certain areas, and
coopetition is a Good Thing.

   -- Owen
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20170605/38ed1ff3/attachment.html>