Legend is an overused word these days, but if 'industry legend' is a phrase that ever applied to someone who worked in the computer business then it would be applied to Frank Soltis – the man who has guided IBM's architecture strategy for more than 20 years.
Soltis rose to fame when he saved IBM's mid-range strategy with the development of the AS400 "Vax killer" in the 1980s and continued when he acted as rescuer again in the 1990s, when he found a lasting place for IBM's Power PC mid-range.
Since then his genius for computer architecture has spread beyond IBM and across the computer business.
If you use an Apple Mac, that is based on a Soltis architecture. Nintendo? The Sony PlayStation? They're Soltis again. The Xbox? "The Xbox 360 is due out about now," says Soltis, in an interview with ZDNet UK this week, and then smiles. "I really like that name, the 360."
Soltis' amusement at the irony of the latest Xbox sharing its number with the mainframe that established modern computing, the IBM 360, is understandable.
But for many, the idea that Frank Soltis is intimately involved with the games business may be hard to grasp. After all, this is the man who built the ultimate workhorse system, the AS400, which blossomed into the IBM iSeries. Like the AS400 before it, the iSeries is the machine that runs thousands of car dealerships up and down the country, that does the really boring invoice processing in travel agents around the globe, that churns away, anonymously, in millions of different businesses. It is the machine of which Soltis is most proud.
Soltis comes from Rochester, Minnesota, and so does the iSeries. That middle-America pedigree is entirely the image that Soltis sought and now cherishes.
For Soltis, there is nothing wrong with "dull". Being dull is a virtue that he has been able to exploit to such a degree that IBM's entire corporate IT architectural strategy is now based in that small city. Mainframes, mid-range, PCs — and as Soltis says, "we may have sold the PC business but we are still in the PC business" — are now all thought out and developed there by the "4,500, maybe 5,000" IBM employees in town.
It's called "Fortress Rochester" by the people who work there and the IBM people who don't, and Soltis thinks the name is absolutely right. From the Fortress he has fought many battles against others, who hail from more fashionable areas — Silicon Valley, New York, Texas — and kept the Fortress true to itself until it has become the dominant force in the largest IT company in the world.
The story of the establishment of the Fortress is so good it is worth the retelling. In the late 1980s, IBM had a problem. The new kid on the block, the Digital Equipment Company (DEC) — which would be taken over by Compaq, which would in turn fall to HP — was eating into IBM's markets for minicomputers with its VAX architecture. IBM, in big...
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For 8 years, from its initial B series release to the E series, the AS400 and I worked together every day.
I may have rose colored glasses here, but through all its incarnations, the damn thing just ran. And ran. And no matter what you threw at it, no matter the semi-regular Cumulative Tapes <kume-tapes>", the precursor to today's never-ending Service Packs, you overlayed on it (generally to enhance it, not fix it!), it hardly ever crashed, hardlly ever needed even a reboot - it continued to churn away 24/7 doing that "dirty, boring work" that no company could survive without. Perhaps it was the proprietary-ness, perhaps it was the lack of flashy lights and pretty GUIs - or perhaps it was just designed by a quality engineer with a single purpose, to do a job and do it well.
I was not alone here - every time you bumped into another AS/400 engineer or operator, the same story. The bloody thing works. Despite IBM's perception that everything with the blue badge is way over-priced, no one ever seemed to complain about the AS/400's bang-for-buck.
Unfortunately time marched on and we needed to follow the Gate's model of future computing. So, are we better off?
The AS/400 served its masters well then, and it still does now, by all accounts. I must say, dealing each day with seemingly never ending system fails or almost daily patching, I miss that stability - and confidence.
Mr Soltis, take a bow.