[email protected] (Ed Gould) writes: > William: > > Thanks it was interesting. What I got a big kick out of how IBM did > not mention their abandoment of education in the 80's and 90's. Their > 2003 date was to late and a dollar short. > > I also thought it was interesting as how they danced around some > topics saying a little bit but trying not to give the reason why IBM's > did such a fantastic job in making sure new systems were supposedly > more compatible with the old. Language Environment was not mentioned > as I am sure it is still an embarrassment to IBM. > > What should be interesting the the years to come how good/bad IBM will > be maintaining compatibility with different OS's amd languages. I am > glass I am no longer full time into the beast as I suspect it will go > down hill because of new writers of OS's will not care about > compatibility the way the oldsters did.
lot of IBM leaving higher education was about the time of 23jun69 unbundling announcement ... and starting to charge for (application) software, se services, etc (result of various litigation ... including gov.) ... saw significant reduction in "education discounts". IBM tried to come back in the early 80s (somewhat about the same time some of the gov. examination was being reduced) with ACIS ... starting to give large grants to lots of education institutions. Part of the issue was trying to rampup/staff a new organization from scratch ... that had enormous pot of money; there were some jokes that transfers from other organizations were people the other organziations wanted to turf anyway. lots of technology you see today came out of that period/funding ... just is very little mainframe. misc. past posts mentioning unbundling http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle some of the pull back in the 90s was result of the corporate troubles of the early 90s and corporation going into the red. In the mid-80s, top executives were predicting that worldwide revenue would double in a few years ... and there was huge build-out of manufacturing capacity (anticipating that doubling) ... instead it went in the opposite direction. In the mid-80s, it wasn't very career enhancing to show effect of growing commoditizing of hardware and resulting shinkage of profit margins on same (and predicting what needed to be done about corporate expense structure). -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
