IP: more on Erich Bloch Honored with Vannevar Bush Award forLong-Running Contributions to S&T

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Title: approve:ggfarber more on  Erich Bloch Honored with Vannevar Bush Award forLong-Running Contributions to S&T  

------ Forwarded Message
From: "Ted Kircher" <tkircher@earthlink.net>
Organization: Information Age Consulting
Reply-To: "Ted Kircher" <tkircher@earthlink.net>
Date: Fri, 24 May 2002 22:13:02 -0400
To: <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: Re: Erich Bloch Honored with Vannevar Bush Award forLong-Running Contributions to S&T  

Dave, Erich Bloch was the director of the IBM laboratory in Poughkeepsie during the latter part of the 1960's.   At that time, I was in OS/360 architecture, and it was thanks to Erich's foresight  that I was able to get virtual memory adopted.  While the programmers felt that 'virtual memory was virtual performance', Erich recognized that virtual memory would sell additional disk storage - a major profit component of mainframes.
> > Unfortunately, IBM lost their visionaries like Erich eventually, and this led to their debacle with Microsoft and Intel.  I retired in '92 when I could not sell multimedia, and upper management still felt they had a chance of selling OS/2 and the PowerPC processor - all wrong decisions!
> > The 'rise and fall' of IBM from the late '50's until '92 was a classic example of the 'rise and fall' theory.  What is really scary in this respect is that IBM if spite of having the advantages of starting the computer business with products is all phases of that industry, consisted of selected people - overwhelming college graduates, had no financial concerns, had no internal racial, gender, crime, ..  problems, had a world-wide 'intranet' since the late '60's and yet its upper management in the mid-'80s (largely with main-frame backgrounds) still lacked the foresight of understanding the role of the PC, multimedia and the Internet.  In short, even though the IBM community was orders of magnitude better (education, work-ethic, morality, ...) than the United States community, they still 'blew it' - just like every super-power in the past.  Hopefully, citizens of the United States will keep this 'histroy lesson' in mind.
Ted Kircher
 
Ted Kircher


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