Was FORTRAN buggy 4344
I disagree about the "almost all the way" part. But that's just from experience. YMMV. :-) I understand this. It was what I was bemoaning before we...
i was told a tale about the gov. anti-trust trial ... supposedly all of the bunch testified that by the late 50s, they had all determined that the single most important factor in being succesful in the computer business was to have a compatible line of computers. supposedly each of them had set out to do it ... but only IBM was succesful in enforcing the rule. supposedly there was constant pressure from plant managers responsible for each specific product ... that their specific product could be made more efficient if they were allowed to deviate from complete compatibility ... by optimizing something or another that was specific to their hardware components. corporate hdqtrs in the other companies were never fully succesful in forcing the different plant locations (responsible for different parts of the product line) to maintain compatibility.
with ibm being the only company achieving the single, most important business requirement .... they could have all sorts of other short comings and still come out dominant.
in the last half of the last century (as computerized dataprocessing proliferated), there were still quite a few people that had been born before 1900. reference to...
... one could conjecture back then that a lot of companies were undergoing rapid growth ... they would get into dataprocessing to achieve certain level of efficiencies ... but then find that with the rapid growth .. they would constantly needing to upgrade their computer. the cost of having to continually having to do conversion ... and possibly having to be severely limited during conversion ... by far dominated many other factors.
misc. past posts mentioning the BUNCH and-or the single most important business requirement to be succesful in the computer business
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