Talk:IBM Future Systems project

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I can't find any references for this in a cursory Google search. Can anyone provide some cites? -- The Anome 11:26, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Updates

I've just edited this page.

I joined IBM as a regular employee in the summer of 1974, just as the crisis over FS was coming to a head.

I'm not sure that the motivation given in the article is correct. Rather than wanting to make software easier to develop, I think that IBM's real motivation was more driven by wanting to develop a new architecture which other companies would be unable to copy. At that time, several large companies, e.g. RCA had computers which were reverse-engineered versions of the S/370.

Security on the project was intense. As pointed out in the John F. Sowa memo, which I've added as an external link, the specification was divided up into over a dozen highly classified documents, each with a separate "need-to-know." This was intended to keep a competitor from stealing the design, but what it really did was keep anyone, inside IBM or not, from understanding it.

I'm also not sure about the relationship between FS and relational database technology. Although Ted Codd was starting to work on relational databases around the same time at IBM, as I recall the database target for FS was concentrated on heirarchical databases, as IMS/DB, and plain ISAM were the predominant DB technologies back then.

[edit] New updates

I had alerted John Sowa, who was one of the key figures in IBM ASDD architecture in the mid-1970s about this article. He contributed some valuable background information to the article, for some reason his contribution was mistaken for vandalism.

I've reverted to his last edit, and cleaned it up.

I can vouch for John's contributions because I was there at the time.