Re: Vendor bashing? Sort of.

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <Cw4FKr.3p5@inmet.camb.inmet.com>,
Mitch Gart <mg@asp.camb.inmet.com> wrote:

>Unfair.  During the 80's Alsys did a lot of promotions, conferences,
>ads, and so on trying to get Ada to catch on with non-defense users.

Well, I said I'd be happy to stand corrected, so thanks for correcting
this impression. Certainly Alsys managed to keep themselves a pretty
good secret from university professors like myself. Indeed, an Alsys
principal once told me Alsys was simply not interested in dealing with 
universities. 

I think the reason given was piracy. I responded that
(in the days when you had to buy the bundled PC memory board) nobody
could use the compiler except someone who'd bought the memory too.
I also mentioned that I knew very few students with Vax-en in their
dorm rooms, so did they really think Vax compilers would be pirated? 
To where? There was never much an answer to this.

Of course, it was their business decision to make, and I'm happy they 
finally reversed it in 1991. 'Course the SEED program, nice as it is,
is quite difficult to get information about, or rather information is
available only sporadically, 'cause the person responsible for it keeps
changing and has tended to give it low priority. Each year, a couple of
months before SIGCSE, we have tried to get them to focus on sending
us (SIGAda EdWG) an updated price list for distribution at our booth.
It was tough going, and a couple of years we ended up with nothing.

>They developed compilers for environments that were not seen at the 
>time as being big DOD markets, such as the PC and IBM mainframes.

Hmmm - I seem to recall that about the time that the IBM mainframe
system came out, FAA was using MVS boxes in the air traffic redesign.
Could this have been part of the motivation for the mainframe port?

(I thought it was VERY innovative, by the way, that Alsys developed
a PC-host, mainframe-target cross compiler. It turned the classical
cross-compiler perception on its head. The ONLY place I ever heard
mention of this - other than the line in the validation list - was
inside IBM Federal, where I had some friends.)

As for the PC compiler, I recall when FirstAda was announced, with great
fanfare, and the price was set at Ada's birth year, "only" $1815. Not
exactly the kind of price the mass market can afford to pay.

>Once they even paid for a focus group where they got a bunch of IS
>managers in and asked them why they use the languages they do,
>what features they need from a computer language, what it would 
>take to get them to change languages, that sort of thing.

So what was the outcome? Don't keep us in suspense...

>With hindsight, these efforts could possibly be criticized as being 
>unsuccessful, or incorrectly implemented for one reason or another.  
>But you can't say they didn't try, because they really did invest lots 
>of time and money over several years.  

OK, I stand corrected. It was not terribly obvious at the time, at
least not in the States. Maybe it was more so in Europe?

I really don't want to continue in this negative vein. We are all
clearly in a bit of a mess now. Where do we go from here? Just
bashing the government for blowing it on the mandate, and for
supposedly making Ada 9X "too big" (though of course nobody wants
_their_ features deleted...) will not get us very far. What next?

Mike Feldman
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Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) - mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Internet)
NOTE NEW PHONE NUMBER.
"Pork is all that stuff the government gives the other guys."
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