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

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ 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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