Yes. There was a time in the early 1980s when a software-only company seemed unlikely to become big.
Two examples I was close to:
Interleaf. Interleaf was the first good commercial document processor.[1] Released in 1981. Ran on Sun workstations, quite well. Years ahead of Microsoft Word. The business model was that they would sell you four workstations, a server, and a laser printer for about $60,000. In my days at the aerospace company, we managed, with great difficulty, to get Interleaf to sell us the software alone, since we already had Sun workstations, a laser printer, and a phototypesetter. (Aerospace generates a lot of documents with diagrams.)
As a software-only company, they could not have obtained funding, or, probably, generated enough revenue to operate.
AutoCAD. The story of AutoCAD is well documented in The Autodesk File.[2] Autodesk was founded in 1982. A software-only company was not fundable back then. Autodesk started off with about $62,000 put in by the founders. (Market cap today, $47 billion.) The term sheets for some VC deals that didn't happen are in there.[3] "The overall flavour of the deal seemed to us totally inappropriate for a company which was, at the time of these negotiations, generating sales equal to the size of the deal every month and generating after-tax profits close to the size of the deal every quarter." Autodesk couldn't get funded on reasonable terms even after becoming wildly profitable.
It was an interesting time. There was so much that obviously needed doing and hadn't been done well yet.
Wrong. Lotus 1-2-3 was launched at the beginning of 1983. They spent a million dollars on their launch, which told all the VC's that software was going to be a big business.
Ashton-Tate was large. Software Publishing (PFS: File) was large. Word Perfect was large.
When has IBM been considered on the rise? I thought they just reinvented themselves into services, sold off the "business machines", and now just suck at the teat of government contracts and consulting? They were considered pioneers in AI with Watson but have been leapfrogged in execution by OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.
By using many of the same accounting gimmicks that GE used. IBM was in near continuous decline from the late-1980s. It's pretty much a shell of what it use to be.
In 1996 they were on the rise as compared to their implosion in 1992/1993.
It’s hard to describe the impact of that time - IBM centers were eliminated or eliminated thousands of jobs. Places like Kingston, NY and Binghamton, NY just died as the mainframe business pulled back dramatically.
Everyone laughs about stupid IBM, but frankly they are the only meaningful survivor of the early days of computing and find a way to stay around.
Are government contracts and consulting considered disreputable for some reason? A reliable and accountable third party firm for custom software development feels like a valid niche worth filling to me, and strikes me as much more moral than the other behemoth tech companies constantly pursuing surveillance capitalism and eroding the digital rights of individuals.
> Are government contracts and consulting considered disreputable for some reason
here in California over decades, income and empires were often consumer-based products with consumer distribution chains.. huge money.. the halls of upstate New York and the skyscrapers of Manhatten were viewed as distant and out of touch. IBM and maybe others were household names, but the source of revenue and the way to participate was completely alien.
So I think you have hit on a nerve, yes.. there is some disrespect
The tech sector is big on innovation and that probably seems orthogonal to government contracts to many. It feels like IBM is a dinosaur using the government to stay alive meanwhile companies like Microsoft and Google have contributed to the ecosystem of tools I use every day while thriving and feel like sexy companies in comparison. I don't know the company that well but this is how I think many view it.
Are they disreputable? Well, they're a niche that you don't get out of.
Companies that depend on big government contracts, and "consulting" (quotes are deliberate here) don't ever rejoin the small business and consumer sectors, ever. They're too big, bureaucratic, and slow.
If you're trying to hold up government and Fortune 100 companies as somehow more virtuous than small-to-medium businesses, you can't be serious. At least they're not too big to fail.
They were definitely recovering dramatically from the early 1990 s&l crisis, with strong offerings in Unix (RS/6000), re-juvenated mainframe hardware in the Z-series, a huge push into services, etc.
Yep that's pretty much it. I have a massive amount of respect for the IBM systems buisness and the people that are a part of it. They are the last surviving computer company, and everyone I've ever met involved in that part of the business genuinely seems to love their jobs and have a real passion for what they do.
The rest of the company could all disappear and I don't think anybody would mind all that much. I've never heard of anybody passionate about working with or on anything besides the core systems. It all looks like consultancy and sales bullshit from the outside.
Arrogance of IBM execs flowed into the DNA of IBMers. It's why those let go struggled to find employment elsewhere in the same industry. Obsolete technologies and processes that were too bureaucratic are tough to unlearn.
Shhh…Jeff Dean is a God who designed the Perfect System, protobuffs - despite not being used by anybody but Google - are the One True Way, and setting company priorities via how well middle-management can win political battles to get inflated headcount is innovation optimal.
Right?
That’s why everybody is raving over how awesome Bard is!
They're a bit of an over-used hammer and people go looking for matching nails wherever.
JSON is wildly imperfect, and lacks types and schema enforcement... but if I have a stream or file of it I can read it with my eyes. Protobufs are opaque blobs without the schema and a pile of code. And they use generated code which is on the whole rather annoying and of varying quality. The binary encoding of protobufs doesn't really give them much of an efficiency edge, either; in this day and age there are some very well tuned JSON etc parsers. And if you're looking for efficiency, there are other formats better than protobufs (or thrift) for that purpose.
At Google I saw it rammed into places where it really didn't belong. Embedded systems, even, causing months of delays while people struggled to get them to work acceptably on a microcontroller class machine. Dogma.
But at least there we had better tools inside Google to work with them than I've seen outside.
TLDR they're probably more good than harm, but I don't think they're a universal good and not the universal answer for how to send messages "between things"
I work in Rust and use binpack, flatbuffers, and json, or hand rolled binary layouts (often using the binary_layout crate), depending on the use case. I don't think there's a universal solution.
Lately Bass is literally worth the $250 I spent for mine off eBay. It’s just flat out the beat techno bass like there is. It’s literally the only preset I’ll ever use because nothing can improve it, it’s just perfect.
Lately Bass (and "Solid Bass") sound perfect because you grew up with them :-) It's like the 303 or 808, deeply imprinted into the GenX psyche. I'm not sure there's anything intrinsic about it other than that they did a pretty good job (trying emulate a bass guitar is my understanding) and then everyone used it.
A long time ago I wrote a little FM synth in C++ and I went through some painstaking effort to copy Lately Bass and actually got pretty close. It's all about the envelopes. That code is lost to time though.
I think I still have a Yamaha TQ5 downstairs, which is basically a 4 op in the same vein as the TX81Z but in a form factor that looks like a 1980s alarm clock or something. Very ... shoulder pads and avocado bathtub era: https://yamahablackboxes.com/collection/yamaha-tq5-synthesiz...
It’s more how it sits in a mix so well, somehow it gives room for your bass drum, some pads, leads, and it doesn’t interfere with any of them. Usually that’s really hard to do perfectly and lately bass just magically stays in its own lane.
Also, if you can get your hands on Korg Opsix it is a lot of fun for FM. Does about as good a job at making FM closer to a subtractive synth in terms of ease of use. Of course, FM will always be way harder to deal with than subtractive, but it’s still the best attempt I’ve seen.
The only other binary message format I saw were flat files with fixed bytes length fields, dtp/sftp in legacy banking systems. And many moved to first csv, then json/xml wherever they could.
I feel there's no one trying to take that crown really.
Glad that someone else noticed that protobufs are very close to a carbon copy of ASN.1. If you don't have the .proto file you even see the .1.3.6.1.2.1 paths in protobuf files, just like you do without .mib files.
Even the integer encoding and tooling is very similar, just not quite identical.
I’m pretty sure protobufs are used by more than just google. It’s become an industry standard. So your comment actually and quite ironically comes off as arrogant
It feels different this time though. Top companies these days have built an intellectual and infrastructural moat that no one can compete with unless they can go back to the 2000's and buy up all the communication pathways.
Kind of funny that 40 years ago, IBM had what would be the golden dream of modern CEOs, a subscription-based business, and decided to destroy it for selling stuff outright.
I had a great subscription business - and when I sold it, the buyer just couldn’t care less. Body shop all the way baby. 5x the revenue - but barely broke even.
The old saying that “revenue is for vanity and profit is for sanity” never rang so true.
The scary thing is how many IBM "experts" from the quantum computing teams fled to quantum startups. I interviewed with some after interning at a FAANG, and as a female in tech with family members who have run tech companies, I like to think my BS radar is pretty good.
It went off constantly with a certain "type" of "startup executive", and I noticed they were all former IBM or Intel. I'm not a negative person but found them all to be visibly political, all sounded like that didn't actually do anything really real, and talked a big game that the company outputs didn't seem to match.
I guess they are costing the quantum startups (aka VCs) a lot of money for very little actual work. This is just my observation and just my experience but I'm keeping tabs because it will be interesting to see how many quantum startups fail over the next few years, and which were run by IBM execs. I have my hypotheses ready.
I’ve seen these types, and their cousins at Accenture, etc move into non-tech sectors as CIOs, CTOs and other leadership positions only to wreck the place in 2-3 years. They’ll quickly fill the upper ranks with their kind and before you know it everyone is fighting for rank, scope, and head count. No one is competent enough to lead large scale technical projects or transformations; technical capabilities will erode and then frozen as operations are outsourced.
As someone who's worked for big blue in a couple of countries and on two non-consecutive occasions ...
Its kind of interesting. It's such a huge organisation that there's room for multiple different streams, trends and directions all the time. There's also a massive disconnect between the people producing tech products, the 'research labs' and the services arms, the latter of which seem to have the focus of upper management more than any others.
The 'labs' are there AFAICT mostly to make the company look good and try to achieve headline-grabbing things like Watson. Very little of this feeds through to the trenches of the tech production lines, which tend to vary from the obvious corporate/enterprise software type setups (monstrously huge, cumbersome software which does things useful to enterprises but takes a long-ass time to adapt, gets its lunch eaten by startups, which then get bought, replace the incumbent, start to grow ... rinse and repeat), to large departments which resemble nothing so much as academia, complete with dingy corridors that haven't been redecorated since the 80s, which have miniscule output expectations and release new products with an absolutely glacial cadence.
Meanwhile the real corporate focus is on selling services and consultancy.
I feel somewhat fondly towards IBM, and I'm glad to have worked for one of the biggest names in our industry. They always treated me well (though make no mistake, they'll lay off thousands in a heartbeat if they think they can save a dollar). At the same time the organisation did feel a bit pathological, particularly last time I dipped my toes in, it felt like a giant in managed decline. Still vast revenues and enough money to cast about looking for lifelines, but ultimately directionless. Perhaps things have changed since 2015... perhaps the redhat acquisition has altered the focus. I'm guessing not though.
45 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 79.2 ms ] threadTwo examples I was close to:
Interleaf. Interleaf was the first good commercial document processor.[1] Released in 1981. Ran on Sun workstations, quite well. Years ahead of Microsoft Word. The business model was that they would sell you four workstations, a server, and a laser printer for about $60,000. In my days at the aerospace company, we managed, with great difficulty, to get Interleaf to sell us the software alone, since we already had Sun workstations, a laser printer, and a phototypesetter. (Aerospace generates a lot of documents with diagrams.)
As a software-only company, they could not have obtained funding, or, probably, generated enough revenue to operate.
AutoCAD. The story of AutoCAD is well documented in The Autodesk File.[2] Autodesk was founded in 1982. A software-only company was not fundable back then. Autodesk started off with about $62,000 put in by the founders. (Market cap today, $47 billion.) The term sheets for some VC deals that didn't happen are in there.[3] "The overall flavour of the deal seemed to us totally inappropriate for a company which was, at the time of these negotiations, generating sales equal to the size of the deal every month and generating after-tax profits close to the size of the deal every quarter." Autodesk couldn't get funded on reasonable terms even after becoming wildly profitable.
It was an interesting time. There was so much that obviously needed doing and hadn't been done well yet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interleaf
[2] https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/
[3] https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_32.html
Ashton-Tate was large. Software Publishing (PFS: File) was large. Word Perfect was large.
People didn't think like that back then. They wanted profits. The idea that a company's value can be measured by their burn rate is 21st century.
Sevin Rosen Funds, out of Dallas, is forgotten now, but they funded Lotus and some very early software startups.
So I ask again, what does IBM actually do?
It’s hard to describe the impact of that time - IBM centers were eliminated or eliminated thousands of jobs. Places like Kingston, NY and Binghamton, NY just died as the mainframe business pulled back dramatically.
Everyone laughs about stupid IBM, but frankly they are the only meaningful survivor of the early days of computing and find a way to stay around.
here in California over decades, income and empires were often consumer-based products with consumer distribution chains.. huge money.. the halls of upstate New York and the skyscrapers of Manhatten were viewed as distant and out of touch. IBM and maybe others were household names, but the source of revenue and the way to participate was completely alien.
So I think you have hit on a nerve, yes.. there is some disrespect
Companies that depend on big government contracts, and "consulting" (quotes are deliberate here) don't ever rejoin the small business and consumer sectors, ever. They're too big, bureaucratic, and slow.
If you're trying to hold up government and Fortune 100 companies as somehow more virtuous than small-to-medium businesses, you can't be serious. At least they're not too big to fail.
Power10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power10?wprov=sfla1
No page for Z16 so here's the Telum processor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Telum_%28microprocessor%29...
The wicked thing I got to work on is the Explorer memory chip. Crazy fast throughput and lane width, truly. 38Gbps for DDR4 RAM
The rest of the company could all disappear and I don't think anybody would mind all that much. I've never heard of anybody passionate about working with or on anything besides the core systems. It all looks like consultancy and sales bullshit from the outside.
Right?
That’s why everybody is raving over how awesome Bard is!
Golang seems bigger outside of Google than inside, too.
(Like the nick, BTW. Wish i'd never sold off my TX81z)
JSON is wildly imperfect, and lacks types and schema enforcement... but if I have a stream or file of it I can read it with my eyes. Protobufs are opaque blobs without the schema and a pile of code. And they use generated code which is on the whole rather annoying and of varying quality. The binary encoding of protobufs doesn't really give them much of an efficiency edge, either; in this day and age there are some very well tuned JSON etc parsers. And if you're looking for efficiency, there are other formats better than protobufs (or thrift) for that purpose.
At Google I saw it rammed into places where it really didn't belong. Embedded systems, even, causing months of delays while people struggled to get them to work acceptably on a microcontroller class machine. Dogma.
But at least there we had better tools inside Google to work with them than I've seen outside.
TLDR they're probably more good than harm, but I don't think they're a universal good and not the universal answer for how to send messages "between things"
I work in Rust and use binpack, flatbuffers, and json, or hand rolled binary layouts (often using the binary_layout crate), depending on the use case. I don't think there's a universal solution.
A nontrivial fraction of all living people have heard this song at least once, and it’s 100% TX81Z at the heart: https://youtu.be/9EcjWd-O4jI?si=XgkC5avENfdTmlQF
(Also, yeah, to other replies, I now realize protobuffs are not to be joked about, I repent. Forgive me.)
A long time ago I wrote a little FM synth in C++ and I went through some painstaking effort to copy Lately Bass and actually got pretty close. It's all about the envelopes. That code is lost to time though.
I think I still have a Yamaha TQ5 downstairs, which is basically a 4 op in the same vein as the TX81Z but in a form factor that looks like a 1980s alarm clock or something. Very ... shoulder pads and avocado bathtub era: https://yamahablackboxes.com/collection/yamaha-tq5-synthesiz...
Also, if you can get your hands on Korg Opsix it is a lot of fun for FM. Does about as good a job at making FM closer to a subtractive synth in terms of ease of use. Of course, FM will always be way harder to deal with than subtractive, but it’s still the best attempt I’ve seen.
Sure, there's things that can be improved, but years later they are still the most ubiquitous binary message format.
I feel there's no one trying to take that crown really.
Even the integer encoding and tooling is very similar, just not quite identical.
They landed on their feet.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-04-19/ibm-earni...
The old saying that “revenue is for vanity and profit is for sanity” never rang so true.
It went off constantly with a certain "type" of "startup executive", and I noticed they were all former IBM or Intel. I'm not a negative person but found them all to be visibly political, all sounded like that didn't actually do anything really real, and talked a big game that the company outputs didn't seem to match.
I guess they are costing the quantum startups (aka VCs) a lot of money for very little actual work. This is just my observation and just my experience but I'm keeping tabs because it will be interesting to see how many quantum startups fail over the next few years, and which were run by IBM execs. I have my hypotheses ready.
Its kind of interesting. It's such a huge organisation that there's room for multiple different streams, trends and directions all the time. There's also a massive disconnect between the people producing tech products, the 'research labs' and the services arms, the latter of which seem to have the focus of upper management more than any others.
The 'labs' are there AFAICT mostly to make the company look good and try to achieve headline-grabbing things like Watson. Very little of this feeds through to the trenches of the tech production lines, which tend to vary from the obvious corporate/enterprise software type setups (monstrously huge, cumbersome software which does things useful to enterprises but takes a long-ass time to adapt, gets its lunch eaten by startups, which then get bought, replace the incumbent, start to grow ... rinse and repeat), to large departments which resemble nothing so much as academia, complete with dingy corridors that haven't been redecorated since the 80s, which have miniscule output expectations and release new products with an absolutely glacial cadence.
Meanwhile the real corporate focus is on selling services and consultancy.
I feel somewhat fondly towards IBM, and I'm glad to have worked for one of the biggest names in our industry. They always treated me well (though make no mistake, they'll lay off thousands in a heartbeat if they think they can save a dollar). At the same time the organisation did feel a bit pathological, particularly last time I dipped my toes in, it felt like a giant in managed decline. Still vast revenues and enough money to cast about looking for lifelines, but ultimately directionless. Perhaps things have changed since 2015... perhaps the redhat acquisition has altered the focus. I'm guessing not though.