Disappearing horizons?

A brief encounter with an IT legend of the 1970s changed the course of my professional life. It marked my departure from the user community with a move to the vendor side and much more …

Are we still enjoying working from home? Is our home office looking more like it’s permanent? Are we in any hurry to return to the normalcy we once knew? Do we truly miss social interactions around the water cooler or coffee pot? Have the changes we have experienced firsthand become our new normal?

I have posted about this more than once over the course of the past year and a half. Or is that more like two years? It is strange to look back and recall the times when the pace of life was fast, almost thrilling for some, but now that the wheels have well and truly fallen off, do we want to return to that ride? Do we really look forward to changing our ways yet again?

When it comes to technology, if you don’t like change then perhaps you should have chosen a different calling. IT is all about change. IT is not a constant but rather the one industry that is rewarded handsomely for branching off into areas others may view as irrelevant.

For those who may not know me all that well, I began my career programming channels on an IBM mainframe. That’s right, access to storage including disk, tape, paper tape even punched cards all had to be programmed. A long time ago I came across a sign in an IT manager’s office suggesting that it’s not a real computer unless you can walk through its channel (processors)! Selector channels, byte and block multiplexor channels – they all had their purpose depending upon device speed.

When I consider change I like to think of it in terms of mileage and equate mileage with experience. On the other hand, I also consider change as beneficial and perhaps even exhilarating. When it comes to HPE NonStop systems who among us recalls the very first sighting of a NonStop system, perhaps in the guise of a Tandem Computer? It’s a matter of record that my first sighting was at the 1983 (or 1984) Hannover Fair (before the split that gave us CeBIT) where a Tandem Computer was being assembled on a stand directly opposite the Nixdorf Computer stand on which I happened to be.

When I take a moment to reflect on the NonStop community, I am left to wonder how enthusiastically we embrace change? You can put this down to reading and editing the articles that have been submitted for inclusion in the upcoming August 2021 issue of NonStop Insider. Put it down too to the snippets of dialogue I have had with the NonStop team where interest IT in general is expanding.

Want to know about NonStop and IoT? About Data Mesh deployments? And what about Swarm Learning? Needing to know more about Analytics and ML / AI? In other words, it’s not so much a matter of a few waves being out there beyond the horizon but more like a serious tsunami. Who read the pinnacle IT industry book Waves of Change by Charles Lecht, founder of Advanced Computer Techniques, published back in 1979? Who saw the two paragraphs I contributed on the topic of how an IBM 370/148 chewed up cycles doing absolutely nothing apart from simply checking lists, managing pages, etc.

The connection to ACT and to Lecht runs deeper. You can still read about it in wiki:

Lecht was a colorful and flamboyant character with an idiosyncratic sense of style, who went around on a motorcycle and was described as a "showman" by colleagues, customers, and competitors alike. At one point his office and desk were completely covered by silver square tiles. ACT (Advanced Computer Techniques) benefited from his flair for publicity: He, together with the company, was profiled in The New Yorker in 1967 and later in industry publications such as Datamation, which once referred to him as "One of computerdom's most flashy characters".

Beyond the flash there was substance and this became visible when the ACT went public:

ACT became a publicly owned company in May 1968. The initial public offering was handled by boutique technology underwriter Faulkner, Dawkins & Sullivan, and the stock value increased almost four-fold during the first day of trading, ending with a three-fold gain that The New York Times termed "spectacular".

Ahh – those were the days; ACT was one of 40–50 software companies started in the early 1960s, many of which would go on to be forgotten. Charlie was also a kind of mentor as he invited me to join the team in New York and to become the company’s database consultant / promoter in the IBM mainframe marketplace – maybe more of an influence than I care to admit.  Remember too, this was back in 1977, mind you:

Lecht's book The Waves of Change, which attempted to foretell changes in the computer industry, was serialized in Computerworld magazine in 1977 (a first for a trade publication) and published by McGraw-Hill in 1979. The foreword was written by Gideon I. Gartner, who would soon found the influential information technology research and advisory firm the Gartner Group.

If you are wondering about my connection to ACT and to Charlie, then you may recall how I worked for the Alberta, Canada, and a distributor of Caterpillar Tractors for some time. The company had invested so much in IBM that they chose to establish a separate service bureau business:

The most important diversification was into service bureaus, which by 1979 accounted for some 40 percent of the company's revenue. These bureaus, which provided their own equipment to handle the data processing needs of clients, were located in New York, Phoenix, Tucson, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and Milan, Italy, and each tended to specialize in a particular area, such as the Edmonton one reporting on inventory and financial status for the Canadian oil and construction industry.

What drove Charlie was change and the acceleration in change that was taking place during his lifetime. IT wasn’t like other disciplines in that change evolved slowly with time and followed considerable and lengthy peer review. In its infancy, you could promote almost anything to do with IT as being new and fresh and an industry breakthrough. And that’s what most of us did during the late 1970s through early 1980s. It was exactly the same thing we all witnessed at Tandem Computers.

Fortunately, Tandem has gone on to do much bigger things. Not to be confused with any of those now forgotten 40 – 50 companies that formed during the previous decade. So, what’s driving change at NonStop today? What patterns have we witnessed over the course of the previous decade that continue to influence our decision making today? Is it the presence of a competitive chip landscape? Is it the maturing of database solutions? Is it the arrival of cloud computing and with it, the cloud experience?

The horizon may be getting further and further away from us but then again, if you are part of a changing industry like IT, you will come to understand that rather than being linear it is cyclical. For almost every promotion we read, there has been at least one previous occurrence. Did you know that back in 1978 Canada became upset over data being shipped to the US for processing thereby undercutting the competiveness of Canadian Companies? Would you have guessed that the newspaper of the day would carry stories that sound as though they were written today?

It is not that the NonStop community is unaware of change as it’s more appropriate to say that the NonStop community has consistently embraced change. Waves and even tsunamis no longer surprise us and to be in a position to seriously run NonStop from within a private cloud may be shocking to some in IT, but to others it’s just one more important transition for NonStop. A Data Base Server built entirely from NonStop SQL supporting multitenancy and delivering access on the basis of as-a-service? Wonderful! Overseeing the models needed to drive meaningful swarm learning? Possible! NonStop serving many more industries than finance and retail? You bet!

All of which is to say you just have to make sure you register for the upcoming NonStop Technical Boot Camp (TBC) 2021 as there will be surprises aplenty. New products and services, new partners and new solutions into expanding markets. Simply change at its best for NonStop. The horizon may indeed be out of sight but would the NonStop community serving IT want it any other way?

As ACT Charlie was keen to emphasize:

“If you buy what I’ve thus far offered – and I believe there is every reason that you should – we can move on to its meaning. It is no surprise that as time passes, the disposition of users is to buy more automation.

“At the low end we find an increasing flood of user-friendly devices that enhance data capture and dissemination … At the high end, we find processors of increasing power that let users tackle bigger jobs with their systems. Together, these micro and macro technologies may be envisioned as stretching total system power to encompass a wider data processing role.”

Whatever happened to ACT? According to EVP Oscar H. Schachter, “We just faded away. We never dissolved. We never declared bankruptcy ... we just kind of faded away.”

Change? It’s all new and it’s all happening for the first time. Edge to Cloud is coming and it’s new and fresh! Insights (into wider data processing roles)! Really? Wait a minute; not so fast. Are you kidding me? Take one more look at those story headlines of 1978 and then of how service bureaus flourished in that period and then tell me what really has happened of late!

Well then, come to TBC 2021 and perhaps you will have the edge over your colleagues on all things cloud! Perhaps just beyond he horizon is yet one more sweep of the IT pendulum. 

Just sayin’ …