On Sat, 24 May 2008 22:42:11 -0400 John W Kennedy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Not really. IBM tended to be on the cutting edge, and often could not > wait for the standards to catch up. (Standard COBOL, for example, did > not get around to supporting disk files until 1968.) Microsoft, on the > other hand, deliberately pisses in standards simply to protect their > monopoly. IBM did also. I actually know a few people who were on the IMS team, and I also served on an ANSI database committee. I do think that MSFT does tend to be more brutal than IBM was. Remember that IBM is/was primarily a hardware vendor, and software was just the stuff that made the hardware work in the hardware vendor mentality. But, the industry leader will try to maintain their lead by locking in their customers, and subverting a standard or simply not complying with a standard is just one method. Additionally, standards do tend to lag technology. (I used to make a living converting Burroughs COBOL to IBM COBOL :-) -- -- Jerry Feldman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id: 537C5846 PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
