Re: Flash to JOG

paul c wrote:

> 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.
>> ...

That jives with my recollection too. Oracle's products are priced similarly, but as I said, one of their employees almost tackled me to force a free evaluation copy into my hands.

The big companies who can pay the big prices won't look at the product if they cannot hire anyone who knows it. Oracle understands that. Microsoft understands that too. It seems to me they have recently increased the prices of their development products while giving away free "evaluation" downloads.

> 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.

Interesting. As far as I am concerned, things like Microsoft's Visual Studio are actually Kahn's legacy. I remember the entirely unusable m editor Microsoft included with its C compiler prior to Turbo-Pascal and how much more usable pwb, their response to Turbo-Pascal's IDE, was. Received on Fri Mar 14 2008 - 16:16:26 CET