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After 24 years of working for one, and only one, company, I've made the decision
to leave Unisys to devote my full efforts to the presidency of the Open Solutions
Alliance (OSA). Can you imagine working for the same company that long? Was
I crazy? Perhaps a little, but it's been an incredible experience.
24 Years with Unisys Led to Open Source
As a young engineer with a budding entrepreneurial spirit fresh out of college
and my 64K Macintosh, I was determined to build software that would change the
world. It didn't take long to realize that I was not only grossly naïve
about my software talents (notwithstanding the fact that the business world
looked pretty snootily on Pascal) but that the company I had joined (Burroughs
at the time - later merged with Sperry to form Unisys) was much more interested
in building hardware - giant mainframes. So, I became a hardware engineer who
loved to code.
Some of my more memorable takeaways from those 24 years include:
- Given the possibility of electrical shorts, never again stick my face into
a group of printed circuit boards when powering them on for the very first
time.
- Looking like a fool when I agreed with Bill Gates that 640K should be enough
for anybody. I had to work my tail off to get programs to fit into those lower
memory bounds just to save face.
- Getting into the Guinness Book of World Records with our ES7000 for hosting
the largest number of concurrent gamers at the Dreamhack Gaming Conference.
Counterstrike was a great game!
- Creating and running the Open Source business at Unisys.
It was that last activity that has led to my decision to go full time with
the OSA.
What Open Source Did for Us at Unisys
When I first came across open source, I was smitten. We were attempting to
boot the ES7000 with our own proprietary operating boot kernel and having all
kinds of problems. Someone suggested that we try this Linux thing. And since
we built the ES7000 with Intel processors (the first Unisys mainframe that didn't
use its own proprietary processors), we figured it might actually work (with
a handful of BIOS changes of course).
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