Real Time View

The NonStop community is fully aware of the danger that comes with making assumptions about NonStop; it’s time IT professionals draw similar conclusions. For the past couple of weeks I have been the primary care giver to Margo. As reported to various sites, the Friday before Christmas Day Margo broke her leg. Badly! She has been convalescing at home following surgery and while she is making great progress, she still looks to me for assistance with almost everything she wants to do. It’s been a tough job keeping her out of her office but she has been keeping visits to her place of work to a minimum. Having said this, I have paid a price albeit minor in comparison. Thinking I know the layout of our home, I have managed to hit almost everything I pass from my feet to my elbows to my hands. Turns out, apparently, I am making assumptions about the placement of items and the image I have in my mind is not accurate. Ouch! Over the course of my career I have made a couple of choices that i...

For the NonStop community, we know what looks good may not only be deceptive but borderline dangerous; mission critical applications are best served by HPE NonStop systems! There was a time not too long ago, when my appearance took on a distinctly “Steven Spielberg look”. Right down to the glasses I wore and to the cut of my hair and beard. With hindsight, the similarities became clearer whenever Spielberg was giving an interview – we shared numerous mannerisms. Without making too fine a point of this, there are photos taken of me during the 2004 Cannes Film Festival that Margo and I swear were on-sold to newspapers. Picture this, walking with Margo towards the red carpet when out of nowhere two young scantily clad ladies on rollerblades swung up to me, grabbed an arm each, turned me to the side when cameras began to flash. Holidaying in Maui, one family followed me practically everywhere I went, taking happy snaps at every opportunity. Goodness knows what now hangs on the walls of t...

No question; we know what we are driving this year! When it comes to NonStop, some questions remain but the answers will not be hard to find! This time last year I posted a blog about our trip back to Silicon Valley where I played tour guide to my good friends, Dieter and Chris Monch. Dieter and I had worked together back in Sydney, Australia, where Dieter had been Managing Director of Nixdorf Computers. Way back in the early 1980s, Nixdorf Germany bought the company I worked for, The Computer Software Company, renaming it Nixdorf Computer Software Company and leveraged the product, EDOS (and EDOS/VS) together with the skilled team of systems programmers to launch the Nixdorf line of IBM Plug Compatible Mainframes (PCMs). That’s right – PCMs from a manufacturer of key-to-disk systems, ATMs and an integrated hardware / software small business software package. Again, hard to imagine the thought process behind entering the PCM business with the slowest (but least expensive) alternative t...