Continuing to provide superior products for forty five years may not sound all that big a deal but it is. For the NonStop community it means that an architecture and a technology is as relevant today as it has ever been in the past.
As the renewed interest in attending events picks up
steam it is worth just a moment to reflect on how far we have come. Margo and I
are only a few weeks away from attending the ATMIA US Conference 2021 in Las
Vegas. Yes, our first in-person major event. We have chosen this event as it is
the main event of the year for the ATM Industry Association and looking back at
the history of NonStop to when it was simply called a Tandem Computer, the
relationship between NonStop and ATMs is hard to miss. When there is so much
conversation about the chicken and the egg it would appear that hitting the
market at roughly the same time, NonStop and ATMs proved that timing is
everything.
We will be busy in Las Vegas as the ATMIA US Conference
will take place in the Mandalay Bay at exactly the same time that HPE Discover
2021 will be taking place. Fortunately, this HPE big tent event will once again
be delivered as a virtual experience. I have to say that I am a little burnt
out by virtual events, but hopefully Margo and I will be able to juggle our
time so that we can join the HPE community for the keynote sessions.
As a reminder we will be two years into HPE CEO Antonio
Neri’s three year plan to offer all HPE products on the basis of as-a-Service.
Neri has set this time next year as the deadline to deliver on his promise and
the implications for NonStop are obvious.
Challenging for the NonStop development team, of
course, but we shall see. When the time comes though I have to believe NonStop
will be ready when the deadline looms as we have already heard from the NonStop
product management team and if you missed Karen Copeland, Manager of NonStop
Product Management, giving an update on progress being made by NonStop
development at least years NonStop Technical Boot Camp, you will have missed
how there would be “waves” of functionality coming to better support
NonStop-as-a-Service. Looks like there will be much to celebrate in the coming
year.
When it comes to celebration, it was back in May 1976
when the first NonStop system was delivered to a customer. The community was
reminded of this milestone when the following appeared in the Tandem Computers
group on LinkedIn -
From: Jim Katzman
Date: Thu, 27 May 2021 17:54:38 PDT
It was 45 years ago in
May, 1976 that we shipped our first Computer System to Citibank in New
York. We had hoped our first shipment would be close to home so
that we could hand-hold our first customer, but it wasn't to happen that way...
Nice to remember...
Apart from a couple of other architectures, including
IBM’s mainframe, for any computer technology to thrive for forty five years is
nothing short of amazing. In 1976 I was living in Edmonton, Alberta, having
just arrived following a time spent in London, UK. As many of you may
appreciate, Australians in general head overseas for their education and I was
no exception.
As strange as it may sound but that move from the UK to
Canada triggered events that I continue to celebrate to this day. It ultimately
led me to join Tandem Computers, Australia, and to then relocate to Cupertino the
following year. All it took was a couple of conversations with the Cupertino
organization in the late 1980s to realize that after two decades working with IBM
mainframes, there was something a whole lot better beginning to make its
presence felt. Perhaps it was Black Monday, October 1987, that happened while
these conversations were taking place with Cupertino and the demonstration of
the unique scalability attributes of NonStop sealed the deal.
How those original developers working on NonStop knew
how to provide almost unlimited scalability in addition to solving the
continuous availability equation remains a mystery to me, but even so, it
cannot be ignored. Celebrating forty five years only whets my appetite for what
we might do to celebrate fifty years! It will be the Golden Anniversary of
NonStop, won’t it – so any ideas as to what we do when this anniversary rolls
around? Perhaps at a future gathering of the NonStop community?
When Black Monday of October 1987 turned financial
markets on their head, the NonStop community was in New Orleans attending the
annual ITUG Summit. At this time I had returned to the US and was living in
Raleigh, North Carolina. Colleagues of mine attended the event in New Orleans
and it was our company’s first exposure to Tandem. They came back so impressed
that it was the catalyst that changed the direction of the company.
You may recall Netlink, Inc. That’s where I worked back
in 1987. No surprises then to read that it was the stories coming back from
that 1987 ITUG Summit that accelerated my own plans to join Tandem. You may
recall too that it was the Netlink’s office in Sydney that morphed into
Insession and then much later, Infrasoft. You may even recognize a much younger
Terry Bishop and perhaps even Phil Dickerson – original founders of Insession –
in the photo above. This was taken in our Sydney offices back in 1985 at a time
when I was the Managing Director. And no, Tandem Computers wasn’t the only
company celebrating Fridays with a beer bust.
ITUG Summits have played a big role in the lives of the
NonStop community over the years. Back in 2004 we celebrated forty years of ITUG. Back then, Yogesh Teli was the ITUG
Chairman and I was the Vice Chairman and the ITUG board made the decision to
invite to that year's ITUG Summit in San Jose former Tandem executives. Jimmy
Treybig was among the executives that returned to San Jose and it proved to be a big hit with the community even as booklets were
handed out featuring bios of those executives in attendance. And many autographs were collected!
We couldn’t have imagined how popular these booklets
proved to be as attendees went around to the executives seeking their
autographs. Apple and Microsoft were in their infancy at the time so perhaps it
was NonStop that set the scene for the mega events that followed up and down
Silicon Valley. Celebrating anniversaries are important and people do pay
attention to them – more so when it represents the passage of many years.
As one marketing analyst
noted when promoting the value of corporate marketing videos, “People do pay
attention. Your longevity is a measure of success. Business relationships are
based on trust and an Anniversary Presentation demonstrates stability and worth.”
Furthermore, when it comes to those members of the NonStop team it could be
said that, “Staff spirit is
tremendously boosted by being part of this celebratory event. There is a sense
of pride and energy associated with the milestone. Even the sales team now has
a theme to rally around and the glow will proceed beyond the year.”
I have moved around the planet multiple times. I have
relocated internationally seven times and I was not even in the military or the
government. These moves were my education and I have no hesitation in
recommending to others to follow a similar path – technology continues to
change so quickly that it remains difficult to stay the path with just one
enterprise. However, flying in the face of this conventional wisdom is NonStop –
the history we can share that dates back to Tandem Computers and to that first
system shipped to Citibank is worth celebrating.
People will pay attention even as providing the
industry’s leading fault tolerant systems has demonstrated stability of company
and the worth of its products. There will be yet another in-person NonStop
event later this year and for many of us it represents the continuity of ITUG
Summits past. Margo and I will be attending and if you happen to be joining us
stop by and say hi! And join us as we will definitely be taking time out to
celebrate the 45th year of NonStop.
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