Re: Flash to JOG

Bob Badour wrote:
> ...
> Turbo-Pascal was $99 for a compiler with a complete IDE. Prior to its
> release, compilers generally cost many times that, and one edited source
> files with WordStar. Phillipe Kahn for all his flaws completely changed
> the market, which is what Alphora needed to do to succeed with D4.
> ...

I seem to remember that Alphora was a couple of grand for a single developer license.

Another big thing Kahn did was popularize the IDE, the lack of which had been one unspoken productivity excuse for many years by informal guilds of batch-oriented developers, on all platforms, mainframe, Unix and micro's. In the same era as the Turbo products, late 1980's/early 1990's, I saw only one mainframe product development organization among many that understood how to structure its internals for productivity and was willing to spend the big bucks for the horsepower that needed. It was surprising that many of the old-school mainframers resisted it. Somewhere Jim Gray wrote about quitting a job in an organization that didn't understand the developer's reality. Received on Fri Mar 14 2008 - 09:57:57 CDT