IBM had the considerable advantage, circa 1964, of having had substantial experience with the inadequacies of the fix-handling machinery it had put together for IBSYS.
It came to terms early with the perhaps regrettable but ineluctable frequency of errors in tested code. Other vendors persisted for long in the notion that they could somehow eliminate all errors before they distributed code. Moreover, IBM (a few unsuccessful excursions aside) has always dealt with professional programmers rather than, say, the end users of Windows. An analogue of SMP/E would not, I suspect, serve Microsoft well in its dealings with most of its end users. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
