Re: The dbdebunk revival

paul c <toledobythesea_at_oohay.ac> writes:
> Among the techies no doubt, but the HW salesmen who made huge
> commissions as well as the IMS execs were brutal, not only directly
> but behind Codd's back. I've heard the stories from a couple of
> people who knew him quite well.

there were some other issues that came into play with marketing.

IMS started out on OS/360 batch MVT platform ... which evolves into the (batch) MVS platform

system/r had been done on the virtual machine vm/370 platform ... and the MVS organization was involved in all sorts of internal politics ... including repeatedly trying to have the vm/370 product killed off.

I've commented that part of the issue was that in the wake of the "Future System" failure ... the culture of the corporation significantly changed ... with lots of people operating their careers with managing information up the chain. Ferguson & Morris, "Computer Wars: The Post-IBM World", Time Books, 1993:

... and perhaps most damaging, the old culture under Watson Snr and Jr of free and vigorous debate was replaced with sycophancy and make no waves under Opel and Akers. It's claimed that thereafter, IBM lived in the shadow of defeat

... snip ...

another quote from the book:

But because of the heavy investment of face by the top management, F/S took years to kill, although its wrongheadedness was obvious from the very outset. "For the first time, during F/S, outspoken criticism became politically dangerous," recalls a former top executive.

... snip ...

one of the things they (also) let me do was play disk engineer in the disk development engineering lab. when I first wandered in, they were scheduling development disk testing dedicated, "stand-alone", 7x24 around the clock. At one point they had tried installing MVS in order to do multiple, concurrent testing ... but found MVS had 15min MTBF in that environment. I offerred to rewrite i/o supervisor to make it bullet proof and never fail (so they could do on-demand, anytime, concurrent testing, greatly increasing disk development productivity). I wrote an internal only paper on what was done and happened to mention MVS with 15min MTBF ... which brought the wrath of the MVS organization down on my head.

-- 
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970