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IBM's future system of the past (jfsowa.com)
72 points by fanf2 on Nov 21, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



Here's another web page on the subject which links to still more:

https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html

That has an interesting quote:

> Note the coverage of FS and what they describe as its "toxic aftereffects" on the corporation in Chapter 3 of Charles Ferguson and Charles Morris, Computer Wars: The Post-IBM World, Times Books, 1993. An excerpt:

>> Most corrosive of all, the old IBM candor died with F/S. Top management, particularly Opel, reacted defensively as F/S headed toward a debacle. The IBM culture that Watson had built was a harsh one, but it encouraged dissent and open controversy. But because of the heavy investment of face by the top management, F/S took years to kill, although its wrongheadedness was obvious from the very outset. "For the first time, during F/S, outspoken criticism became politically dangerous," recalls a former top executive."


Several interesting internal documents about FS have recently surfaced at Bitsavers. See http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/futureSystem/


Interesting history! I liked the comments about Linux eventually wining, one guy, Linus, starting something far more impactful than the mountain of work IBM did on Future System.

A little off topic, but the author of this article John Sowa wrote one of my favorite technical books a couple of decades ago on the topic of Knowledge Representation. Really influenced how I thought about information.


> one guy, Linus, starting something far more impactful

I'd just like to interject for a moment...


IBM was awarded a patent for blockchain-powered scientific research data. With it, they aim to make sharing such data more secure and efficient for the scientific community. This is yet another patent among many for the tech giant and global leader in blockchain development.




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