Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!oliveb!sun!pope@vatican
From: pope@vatican (John Pope)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: AT&T Joining OSF
Summary: IBM: not invented there
Message-ID: <63895@sun.uucp>
Date: 11 Aug 88 17:00:30 GMT
References: <347@spies.UUCP> <670025@hpclscu.HP.COM> <24355@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <63717@sun.uucp> <8329@smoke.ARPA>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: pope@vatican (John Pope)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Lines: 18
In-reply-to: gwyn@smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )

In article <8329@smoke.ARPA>, gwyn@smoke (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
>In article <63717@sun.uucp> pope@vatican (John Pope) writes:
>>>[...] IBM became big by being reliable; they never did anything
>>>really new so what they had was most likely going to work.
>>Aren't you ignoring things like RISC and Virtual Memory?
>
>Funny, the Burroughs salespeople used to say that IBM's "introduction"
>of such features helped Burroughs sales, because finally there was a
>market demand for what Burroughs had already been supplying..

I had always assumed the IBM machines predated the Burroughs 5000, due to 
"IBM invented virtual memory" statements I'd seen several places. Gullible me.
In fact, someone mailed me that the (circa 1960) ATLAS machine predates either
of them. As for RISC, did Burroughs have anything prior to the 801 ? Will they
be serving IBM with patent violation notices soon #:-) ?
-- 
John Pope
	Sun Microsystems, Inc. 
		pope@sun.COM