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Story: Sun's plans...and how they could go wrong

Posted by: Samudra E Haque (Friday 24 September 2004, 6:08 AM)

I am an old timer (relatively speaking, graduated with B.Comp.Sci in 1989) but had management responsibility for a Data General MV/10000 Minicomputer at the University of Minnesota. I literally lived in and around that machine, it was fantastic but ultimately an orphan due to Data General's reluctance to adopt UNIX (it did but much later than we needed it the O/S was AOS/VS). I was one of the very early ("alpha") adopters of Unix on that machine, and how we struggled to get that that tape from far away developers is a long story.

It's my recollection that In the book "Soul of a New Machine" (review: http://www.forum2.org/eran/shelf/soul-machine.html excerpt: http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/kidder.htm) concerning the development of the Data General Eagle minicomputer from renegades of Digital Equipment Corporation - one of the lessons that was taught to us in undergraduate courses "History of Computing" was that DEC sales team actually wrote to "warn" customers not to deal with a competing company that "may call", and they went so far as to legitimise their competition by actually _naming_ their competition, i.e., "a company called Data General". Thus people who did not know of Data General before DEC came to know about them, and since IT managers are a curious lot they obviously wanted to know more about the "upstart, renegade" from DEC, which ultimately led them to Data General faster than the company had plans to market itself.. Data General was really a small company but it was being "promoted" by a behemoth as a "upstart" and treated as a competitor from the start, so fait acompli.

Sun naming Redhat is akin to DEC introducing Data General. Redhat needed this introduction to the corporate and scientific data centers, and Sun has meanwhile admitted it's achilles heel in public no less, I have but one word for this... "D-u-h".