On 4/30/07, Richard Nuckolls <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Okay,
I have been sucked into this conversation:
Ditto.
> I would also
> suggest that if the UniData folks were satisfied with PI/PI Open/
> UniVerse,
> they would not have gone to the trouble of creating UniData.
Given the little I know of the various personalities, I think the UDT
developers would have gone ahead anyway. The initial developer had a
"vision" which is what he told the judge when UniData is became one of
the few "Pickalikes" to win the lawsuit brought against them by Dick
Pick and co.
The early versions of Unidata were poor cousins to PI/Open (imho).
One of the Unidata engineers sat in our offices many years ago and
said that their versions of Basic and the query language were based
directly on the Prime Information manuals. ( They did not have a copy
of PI in the office while they were working to emulate it.)
Yes, I'm not sure what, if anything, PI/Open had to to do with
UniData, but Pr1me Information was the basis for the specification,
with an interest in working more tightly with various industry
"standards" of the day, including unix and SQL (but via
OpenServer/OpenClient instead of ODBC--bad call on that).
My understanding is that Unidata had a database, and was looking for
an established market that they could enter with it; they chose the
MV market.
The original developer worked for a PI shop and learned from PI
experts, at least one of whom is likely still on this list.
Vmark (which predated Unidata by a number of years, I believe)
It depends on what milestones are used. My recollection of the
conversations is fuzzy now, but I attempted some amount of fuzzy
accuracy in the start of each effort in the family tree poster,
showing uniVerse starting (perhaps as a company, with products coming
later, sorry I forget that right now), slightly before UniData.
http://www.tincat-group.com/mv/familytree.html
saw an
opportunity to move the MV market from Reality and Primos to Unix,
That opportunity included the fact that Microdata built it into their
Reality product not to permit any disk drives other than those they
made (and perhaps other attempts to permit customers to use only their
hardware). This prompted some VARs to form a consortium out of which
UniVerse came.
which they correctly perceived as supplanting the existing
proprietary minicomputers of the time. It took several years after
Vmark released Universe for Prime to release their (excellent) Unix
version of Prime-Information.
Prime failed for familiar reasons: Their development and marketing
structure was based on the high-margins of proprietary systems, and
they were the target of a prolonged hostile takeover attempt, which
dissuaded customers from updating their equipment and cost the
company the farm. In retrospect, Unix had probably doomed them; I
doubt that they could have shifted their structure fast enough to be
successful with it.
:-)
I remember it well and have a soft spot in my heart for Pr1me.
I'll add the tidbit that UniVerse did lose the lawsuit against them.
This was based on the line from the Alfa UPIX guys to UniVerse and the
fact that there was an individual working at either Pick Systems (I
think) or a Pick customer site who "caught" one of the UPIX guys
taking a full backup of the database/OS including source code.
Since that time, UniVerse incorporated IN2, the French version, so
they definitely do now have some Pick systems code in their product,
where UniData was a clean room implementation, even if the specs were
from PI.
At least that is how I recall the conversations I have had to date
about the history of these products. I'm happy to hear other stories
and dates.
Cheers! --dawn
--
Dawn M. Wolthuis
Tincat Group, Inc. tincat-group.com
Take and give some delight today
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