In a message dated 10/2/2005 1:57:51 P.M. Central Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>how many people know where the spring '68 SHARE meeting was held? I do for one. Headquarters hotel was the Shamrock Hilton in downtown Houston. >How many attended? I did, for one. >Did you get to have a tour of the local large installation? Yes. I think it was on Friday, which is typically a slow day at SHARE. A large bunch of us SHARE attendees were bused to the Manned Spacecraft Center near Houston, where we saw a roomful of IBM 360/75s churning out work and crunching numbers, all paid for by FEDS (also known as NASA) under the Project Apollo program which was implementing the following statement by the then late President JFK: “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. ... in a very real sense, it will not be one man going the moon ... it will be an entire nation.” [25 MAY 1961; speech to a special joint session of Congress] This project paid for a large number of full-time IBM programmers under their Federal Systems Division who were working at this facility near Houston, among whom were the two original developers of HASP, Tom Simpson and Bob Crabtree. HASP evolved into JES2, recently discussed in another thread. I don't think it is conspiratorial if you try accurately to predict the national economy 6 to 12 months into the future. I think it is better referred to as realism. If your predictions happen to be based on real facts that are unknown to or disbelieved by the masses, then so be it. Real fact: almost all large American businesses are now the recipients of large funding by various U.S. government programs as well as supported indirectly by special tax breaks. I have no knowledge that IBM is receiving any special treatment in this regard, but they have had a large Federal Systems Division for many decades that does work under contracts that are publicly and competitively bid on, just as many other large companies do. I have read alternative news items discussing the [conspiratorial] idea that the U.S. Federal Reserve System is intervening to support the U.S. stock markets, but I have never read anything that claims the U.S. is supporting IBM disproportionally more than it supports all other big businesses, either directly through contracted work or indirectly through tax breaks or possible stock market manipulation. Competitively achieved contract awards are publicly documented (I think in Commerce Business Daily). Tax breaks are publicly documented in the Congressional Record. Stock market manipulation is a matter of opinion. Bill Fairchild ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
