Interesting Piece on IBM's Reversal of Fortune in the 90's

See my comment on YouTube.
I was working at IBM UK Hursley Laboratories in 88-89 and what I saw going on there now looks to me like a huge IP rip-off by IBM employees following the US Military/Intelligence revolving door pattern of "economic development" where employees leave with tech developed at IBM and set up startups which may/may not contract back to IBM. One of those things developed at IBM was something that looked quite a lot like Windows NT! (I wrote a lot of it in 1989).
At 11 minutes 32 seconds, the dual-boot OS/2? I didn't ever even hear about that. With a bit of help I could easily have got Windows 3.0 running as an OS/2 sub-task. It would have been a couple of months work for Tony Washer, Alastair Simon and I.

At 13 minutes 1 seconds. Lotus Notes was developed in 1989. I wonder how they handled the "strategic limitation" of a single transaction on any single IBM PC/NETBIOS session open at any time?  Somebody at IBM could check the way I did this in RIPSS around that time, using a little state table and some fairly hairy bit-twiddling. It was only a couple of dozen lines of code. Compare that with the early branches of Lotus Notes and you might find something amusing. That code may have gone to lotus via a little outfit based in a business park in Reading. They made LAN workgroup software for Windows. They once interviewed me just to find out whether I had written it, I think. Tim Hyde, who worked for some shower in Reading who who developed COBOL interpreters probably knows something about that.


Hey, IBM, why don't you sue me? That would be really interesting! I am serious! See I'm Still Looking for A Job. This post has a sound track:


See Public Plunge Protection Does Not Work and Bill Gates Getting the Hell Out of the Kitchen. Girls, we might just get our General Assembly hacker-maker-breaker-space in CBBA after all! See Women Programming Computers:


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Stefan Molyneux on Resource Based Economy

Nikola Tesla and the End of The World

Sabine Hossenfelder - Lost in Math