[GRLUG] A Moment of Silence

[Bob Kline]

IBM is the company that fought
Unix so hard that the company almost
went down in flames.  Realizing that
Unix could run on any size machine,
whereas IBM had a different OS for
each series of machines, it sought to
kill Unix.  The idea was roughly to just
muddy the waters.  Come up with its
own kind of Unix, and make sure it
was incompatible with AT&T's version.
Something like M$ did routinely in other
areas.

IBM's effort was misguided.  Almost
as much as it's lack of understanding
of the importance of the PC, which it
had given legitimacy.  IBM had every
opportunity to put Unix on a PC and
change everything.

   -- Bob


On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Joseph Workman <joseph.workman at gmail.com>wrote:

> Phil - that is funny you bring up that story. IBM iSeries/AS/400/i5
> sales/service/administration people used to (and maybe still do) tell a
> similar story about a AS/400 that was dry walled into a closet for years...
> only to be found when they needed to do a system upgrade.
>
> On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Philip J. Robar <philip.robar at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> On Sep 7, 2011, at 3:10 PM, Ben Rousch wrote:
>>
>> > I would like to ask for a moment of silence. I just decommissioned my
>> > company's main Samba virtual machine which had been running Ubuntu
>> > 6.06 LTS since 2006.
>>
>> At Sun we regularly heard about machines that had been running for years.
>> Solaris is so reliable that smaller customers have forgotten where their
>> servers are. One story, perhaps apocryphal, told of a small server that got
>> walled up when a room was rearanged and had to be found by breaking through
>> the wall board. A field support person once found a machine in a closet that
>> was so clogged with dust that the fans were no longer spinning, but it still
>> running happily.
>>
>> I wouldn’t be surprised if AIX or HP/UX were similarly as reliable, but
>> I’m pretty sure that SGI’s IRIX couldn’t make similar claims:
>>
>> A friend of mine (also an ex-Sun person) early on in his new job as VP of
>> Eng. at an Internet Bubble Startup* asked the founder, “I’ve noticed that
>> the SGI servers panic rather regularly. Has anyone looked into this or
>> called SGI?”
>>
>> Founder, “No need to worry, they just do that. And they were free."
>>
>> My friend’s head then exploded.
>>
>>
>> Phil
>>
>> *Bigfoot for those of you with long memories.
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Joseph Workman
> C.616.734.1411
>
>
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