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Joy In Software
I've complete a podcast on the topic of finding joy in software development.
Quote of the day:
If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.
Mitsugi Saotome
Read more
May 18 2008, 12:56:38 PM EDT
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Origins of the ARPANET
A recent conversation I had with a colleague reminded me of the origins of the ARPANET; I had an email address there way back in 1979 when I was a professor at USAFA.
The root of the first link above is interesting unto itself as a compendium of first things and last things.
Quote of the day:
Do first things first, and second things not at all.
Peter Drucker
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May 02 2008, 10:22:58 AM EDT
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RSDC YouTube Videos
Rational's events team has had a creativity explosion resulting in this year's RSDC having a playful yet very compelling theme on software development as a team sport. Teasers for the R-Heroes theme may be found here on YouTube. Be sure to watch the last few seconds of the second trailer. Oh, and by the way, William Shatner will be one of our keynote speakers; you may know him from Boston Legal although if memory serves me right, he had something to do with a science fiction series back in the 60s. :-)
Quote of the day:
A good life is one that is artistically made.
William Shatner
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Apr 30 2008, 12:13:34 PM EDT
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Rational Machines++++
A little more history for the books; I'm enjoying capturing these memories of Rational, not that I'm obsessed with the past, but simply because I value keeping the human stories alive, for in the end, that's all that really matters.
Davyd Norris from Rational's offices in Australia wrote to report that a few years ago, they had received a request from Malaysia for R1000 spare parts. Greg Bek and Stu Garrow recalled that our Adelaide office had kept a number of old R1000s (I remember autographing one of those machines on a trip long ago), machines that were then stored away and largely forgotten. As it turns out, the wheels of bureaucracy spun on and someone somewhere was still paying for that storage unit. The team tracked down the storage company, located the unit, cut open the lock, and discovered a stash of very well-preserved machines. Sadly, sometime after the IBM acquisition and due diligence was done on all of Rational's assets, a team came in and crushed, melted, recycled, and essentially discarded those machines. Alas, such is the fate of all things; dust to dust, ashes to ashes, transistors to silicon.
Stu and Greg established a company serving as a Rational business partner, and apparently rescued a complete working R1000 400 series, which is now sitting in Greg's garage. As Davyd reported, the list price back then was about one million US, so if any of you are hankering for an Ada machine, there you go.
Joe Marasco and Dave Bernstein continue their dialog with me, and recently wrote with some clarifications and additions. Dave noted that the compiler used for Rational's first bootstrapping work was the ADAS compiler (addressing a sequential subset of Ada; back then, talk of Ada subsets was heresy) from David Luckam's group at Stanford, a group that included not only Howard Larsen and Dave Stevenson (whom I'd mentioned in a previous blog) but also Wolf Pollak. Dave went on to clarify that the model 100 R1000 used a PDP 11/24 as the I/O processor and that the model 200 used a Motorola 68000 microprocessor that provided a DEC Unibus, with the hardware and software work led by Wayne Meretsky.
Continuing with Rose's history, Dave observed that it took about five years for Rose to achieve critical mass. Rose 1.0 was a failure for a number of reasons and was painfully withdrawn from the market (I still have an original shrink-wrapped box 'o software). This was Rational's first non-Ada project, and among other things we had made an architectural decision to use an early OODBMS that in the end proved to be a profoundly bad idea. Jon Hopkin's company, Palladio, provided us with a PC-based Booch and OMT method tool. This acquisition was initially precarious yet was brought back from near-death by Dave and Nick Berens. Dave took over the Rose effort in 1994 and in 1995 development of Rose 2.0 began, with Loren Archer as marketing director and Greg Myers as the Rose Business Unit manager. Rich Reitman (who is now at Adobe) developed a version control strategy for Rose, a decision that helped differentiate Rose in the market and greatly contributed to our development process. Simultaneously, Joe took on the Microsoft/RBU coordination, wherein we bought Visual Test from Microsoft and brought them on as a sponsor of the UML, a partnership that gave the UML considerable momentum. Dave Stevenson, Mats Goethe, Jack Tilford, Tom Wilcox, Howard Larsen, Jim Archer, and Adam Frankl were the members of this team, whose efforts led to the Rational/Microsoft announcement on October 5th, 1996 (at OOPSLA, if I'm not mistaken) of UML tooling within Visual Studio. In the end, the work that the Three Amigos (Jim Rumbaugh, Ivar Jacobson, and me) did culminated in Rational forming an amazing constellation of support (from Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Oracle....who would have ever thought that these companies could come together in agreement?) that pushed the UML and modeling in general over the edge. With Rational at the center and Rose good enough, Rose revenues crossed an important threshold that by 1997 had contributed to a dramatic growth in Rational's valuation such that we we able to acquire a number of other companies, that in turn leading to the Rational Unified Process and the Rational Suites. Throughout all this, revenue from Apex provided the bridge that gave Rose time to find its way; without Apex, Rose could have never flouished.
A bit more on Palladio from Dave. Rose 2.0 was essentially Palladio's Windows-based tool (then called the Object System Designer), converted to use Petal as its intermediate representation (we were all about flower images back then). Dave Stevenson did that work, with Frank Tadman contributing the C++ forward engineering bits and Tom Wilcox doing the C++ reverse engineering bits, leading to what we called roundtrip engineering (adapted from Mike Druke's phrase, roundtrip gestalt problem solving). Our nascent field teams (with Alex Baran, Tom Schultz, and Terry Quatrani aka TQ aka Mom) found that the ability to harvest models from as-built systems was the feature that really pushed Rose 2.0 over the edge of value and acceptance.
Quote of the day:
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
Willa Cather
Apr 10 2008, 12:00:00 AM EDT
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Rational Machines++
My previous blog entries regarding Rational's past continue to bring responses from ex-Rationalites.
Tom Johnson - who reports that he still "dabbles" with Apex - wrote to remind me of Ramachandran Krishnaswamy and Dan Ehrenfried.
David wrote to fill in some details of Rational's earliest history. In 1979, David had been funded by DARPA to explore techniques for the compilation of Ada tasking. Dave Stevenson and Howard Larsen were then grad students working with David to build the Ada-M compiler, which was written in Lisp. Mike and Paul had been developing their idea of an Ada machine and so looked to the Ada-M effort to bootstrap Rational's first validated compiler. David reminisced about a meeting in his dining room in December 1980 which brought together the gang with some venture capitalists. David is a professor emeritus at Stanford and is currently working on R&D in event processing.
Joe Marasco sent me a lengthy missive detailing the R1000 family tree, with Dave Lofgren and Jim Archer adding some additional bits. Rational's machine evolved through four series of different models, each representing some significant packaging or architectural change. We indeed shipped our first machine (which was named simply R1000, with the series 100 moniker added later) to Rolm on December 31st, 1984. Rational ended hardware production in 1993, shipping its last machine to the Danish Navy. There are still several R1000s under support and maintenance contracts; Jim Archer continues to support the software side of Rational's earliest products and Dave Lofgren handles the hardware end. Joe estimates that a total of approximately 300 machines were shipped over the R1000's lifetime. As Joe further reported:
The "original" R1000 was subsequently labeled the "Series 100" due to extensions of the product line. The Series 100 was large enough to require elevator disassembly at certain customers, and the joke at the time was that it had been built that way because it had to be shipped with a tech rep, and, after all, the tech rep had to live somewhere.
The "Series 200" was led by marketing manager Yosi Amram in 1986, and was launched in the fall of that year at Ada Expo. It came in three models: a model 10, model 20, and model 40. The low-end model 10 was never purchased. The model 40 was two model 20's literally put into one larger cabinet. Each half of a 40 had its own control terminal and its own peripherals; as I recall, it was challenging to get them to share a printer. The first Series 200s were shipped to Philips AB at the very end of 1986. The Series 200, especially the model 40, was the "workhorse" of the product line for several years (1987 - 1989), with many of them at sites such as Philips, CSC, Rockwell, and others. Customers who bought them in substantial quantities began to understand the difficulties of doing large-scale development on multiple R1000's. The original R1000 employed a PDP-11/24 as an I/O processor, which enable the use of off-the-shelf disk, tape, and communications controllers In the series 200, this was replaced by a Motorola 68K microprocessor that generated the DEC Unibus so we could continue to use those controllers. Wayne Meretsky did both the hardware and software for this revamped I/O system.
In the fall of 1989 yours truly fielded the Series 300, which was basically a "skin job." It used the same boards as the 200, but Mr. Druke and his hardy band of hardware engineers weaseled the form factor down somewhat further. The idea was to get the price down as much as possible without doing any major engineering, although disk and tape drive progress allowed us to continue to reduce the size of the package. The 300 had the ability to increase the main memory up to 64 Meg from 32; doubling the memory had a big effect on performance. The 300 product line also included a coprocessor variant, which meant you could use the processor and memory in conjunction with a disk farm from Sun. In an unexpected turn of events, the pesky salespeople continued to sell the more expensive "standard" R1000 configuration to the detriment of the coprocessors. I believe the leader in this regard was Tom "Too Tall" Smith, who sold a raft of full-up Series 300 "model 40 equivalents" to Lockheed for Space Station Freedom in 1990.
The immediate reaction to fielding the 300 was to get to work on the 400. Quickly abandoning the co-processor concept, the 400 took the next logical step of reducing the package size still further by incessant shrinking of the drives and a re-do, in under a year, of the processor and memory boards, as well as redesigning the I/O system yet again. The basic architecture of the processor and memory boards was unchanged, but the critical "zero insertion force" edge connectors got revamped so the boards could be made smaller. This feat had previously been postulated as impossible, but when faced with imminent extinction, Druke's hardware boys somehow managed to make it happen. The Series 400 came out in the fall of 1990, and was as small as the R1000 ever got. We sold 400's from late 1990 through 1993, when we finally ceased producing new hardware.
Cross-correlation of these dates would indicate that we commenced the Apex development project AFTER we fielded the series 400. I believe that during the latter part of 1990 and into early 1991, the hardware people were still working on a "next generation" R1000 that would completely re-architect the basic boards. But that effort got killed at the end of 1990 in the famous decision to abandon the hardware business. Curiously, it was about nine months after that that the Apex team was formally constituted and launched. During the two-year period it took to build Apex, most of the hardware people either left, worked mostly in support, or transitioned to a number of "Delta" improvement projects. Delta was the R1000 OS of the day, and the "inside joke" was that everything wrong with it would be "fixed" in Epsilon. Of course, Epsilon never happened; when the R1000 was replaced by Apex, the operating system became one of the standard vendor's version of Unix.
Joe went on to lead the Apex team, which was released in September 1993. Reporting on Rational's revenue engine during that era, Joe noted that:
By the way, circa 1995, when I was managing the combined Apex - Verdix programming tools team, the license revenue split between Ada/C++ programming environments and Rose was almost exactly $45M Ada (C++ was minuscule) and $5M Rose. That is, two years after Apex's launch, it still contributed 90% of the license revenue of the company. It took Rose several years (after 1995) to catch up and surpass the Ada revenues; Apex and Ada stabilized at roughly $50M and then slowly and steadily declined, whereas Rose just continued to grow. And of course post-1996 we started to acquire other companies, which changed the ball game completely. But we had organic growth through the mid-nineties, and much as the R1000 sustained us until Apex came along, Apex was the principal revenue stream during the several years it took for the Rose revenue stream to build and mature. Had Rose been fielded as the sole product of a start-up company, it would have never survived. Although Rational got on the commercial map because of Rose, it took about five years of subsidy from the rest of the business to find its legs; ironically, it was (by then) Rational's financial strength that allowed Rose to eventually out-market its competitors.
Quote
of the day:
History never looks like history when you are living through it.
John
Gardner
Mar 20 2008, 12:00:00 AM EDT
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Living A Life Of Ands
In any new social situation, wherein people are just getting to know one another, inevitably someone will ask of the other "what do you do?" Depending on the circumstances, I will reply with something as simple as "I'm into computers" or "I do software"; if I want to be a bit more provocative, I'll say that I'm a free radical; if i need to sound more formal, I will tell people that I'm an IBM Fellow; if I want to sound mysterious, I'll say that I'm an author. All of these things are true, yet none of them are sufficient.
I've always found this line of questioning so predictable yet so superficial. I am not defined by what I do, nor do I do just one thing. At the moment, I'm a chief scientist and a Fellow and a software architect and a project manager and a programmer and a researcher. I'm also a mentor, lecturer, consultant, software archeologist, theorist, methodologist, developer, pragmatist, pioneer, mediator, historian and visionary. In my working career I've been a mower of lawns, a scooper of ice cream, and a singer of songs. By act of Congress, I was once even an officer and a gentleman. I'm a good friend and confidant, a godfather, and a loving husband. I listen well and play well with others. More abstractly, I'm a child at heart, a warrior, a servant, a leader, a dreamer, a lover, a believer, and most of all an awe-struck seeker.
In short, I believe in living a life of "ands," a life that is defined not by what I do at the moment but rather one that is defined by living fully in the moment. I will be the first to admit that I'm most imperfect when it comes to being fully present in every moment or living fully in integrity with my values, but such are the consequence of being fully human.
It's time to add another "and" to my list of "things that I do."
I've been a part of Rational since its foundation some 26 years ago, but now it's time for me to move on. However, I'm not going far, for I'll be joining the Software Technology Department at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center as Chief Scientist for Software Engineering. There I will continue my work on the Handbook of Software Architecture and will mentor and lead various software engineering projects that are beyond the constraints of immediate product horizons. I will continue to engage with real customers working on very real problems; I will also deepen my relationships with academia and other research organizations around the world. Much of my professional career has been dedicated to improving the art and the science of software development, and that won't change at all, although I hope that my reach will be a bit further.
May each of you be blessed with living a life of "ands."
Quote of the day:
Moving on is a simple thing, what it leaves behind is hard.
Dave Mustaine
Mar 18 2008, 07:53:00 AM EDT
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And One More Thing
The venerable Joe Marasco reminded me of another ex-Rationalite, the late Mark Sadler. Mark was a dear, dear friend, and as Rational was expanding, he was the point man for our international operations. I recall several wonderful trips with mark to Japan. Mark, you are missed...
Quote of the day:
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Mark Twain
Mar 18 2008, 12:00:00 AM EDT
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Rational Machines
A few days ago, on the fifth anniversary of Rational's acquisition by IBM, I blogged about Rational's history. Since then, I've received numerous emails from ex-Rationalites offering their memories. I was especially delighted to hear from John Haynes, who reminded me of Rational's manufacturing team. John and I actually shared a living space for a short while. When Rational began and after Mike, Paul, and I had finished our commitments to the Air Force, I continued to live in Colorado but then commuted to Silicon Valley. For about a year, every Monday morning I'd catch a flight from Denver to San Jose, work at Rational from early to late, then return to Denver on Friday. I had an apartment in Mountain View where I'd crash after work, and it was there that John would occasionally stay. As John reminded me, Rational -being at the time a hardware company, not just a software company - had a killer manufacturing team that included Ray Myers (VP of Manufacturing), John (Materials Manager), Bev Hartnell (Senior Buyer), Bob Walton (Manufacturing Engineer), Walt Rider (Manufacturing Engineer), and Al Prez (Chief Mechanical Engineer). Dennis Paddock led our customer support team. Rational shipped its first machine (to Rolm, as I recall) on the last day of 1984 and its last R1000 (to IBM, Lockheed, or Rockwell...neither John nor I remembered) in 1988. Rumor has it that there is still at least one intact machine out there (but obviously not being used for production work).
Quote of the day:
Some day, on the corporate balance sheet, there will be an entry which reads, 'Information'; for in most cases, the information is more valuable than the hardware which processes it.
Grace Murry Hopper
Mar 07 2008, 12:00:00 AM EST
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Rational Anniversary
Today is the 5th anniversary of IBM's acquisition of Rational Software. Oh, what a marvelous ride it's been since we began our journey in 1981.
This is an updated version of my original post; thanks go to David Bernstein, Iain Gavin, and Eric Schurr for their feedback.
By the way, I know I've left out names in the following missive: the old guard included Dave Stevenson, Rich Reitman, Joe Marasco, Jack Tilford, Jim Archer, Danny Shifman, Bob Bond, Nick Berens, Kevin Haar, Kevin Kernan, Adam Frankl, Walker Royce, Doug Earl, Jon Hopkins, Carmen Facciobene, Sunny Gupta, Phil Levy, John Lambert, Jerry Rudisin, Hajime Saito, Hugh Scandrett, Tom Smith, Gary Sward, Howard Larsen, Rob Dickerson, Adam Frankl, Pamela Roussos, Robert Gersten, Buton Goldfield, Tom Schultz, John Lovitt, Dave Bernstein, Lisa Browsword, Lucian Beebe, TQ, Eric Schurr, Philippe Kruchten, Dean Leffingwell, Brett Bachman, Iain Gavin, Walker Royce, and many, many others. Rational started with two people and before the acquisition by IBM grew to almost 4,000 people world wide, with sales starting to edge close to $1 billion per year. It is to these colleagues that I dedicate the following, for without them, Rational would have been a far lesser company.
You'll find a brief history of Rational on Wikipedia; I take full responsibility for the memories that follow. I do hope I got the basics of this history right, but if I didn't or if I left out mention of some important event or person, please do email me.
Mike Devlin, Paul Levy, and I graduated from the US Air Force Academy in 1977. Paul was one of my roommates while we were both in 21st squadron, and Mike and I were both computer science majors. After graduation, I was assigned to the Space and Missile Test Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base and Mike and Paul were assigned to the Satellite Control Facility in Sunnyvale. Along the way, I picked up my masters at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Mike and Paul attended Stanford. As my first assignment was drawing to a close and I was looking around for my next position, i had a conversation with Larry Druffel, a former instructor of both Mike and I at USAFA, who spoke of the DoD's early efforts to define a common high order language; Bill Whitaker had started the High Order Language Working Group, a group that eventually transmorgified into the Ada Joint Program Office (AJPO), first headed by Larry. Larry noted that one of the first projects that would attempt to use Ada was at the Satellite Control Facility, and that I should get in touch with Mike and also consider a role I might play in the emerging new language. I called Mike, made my way up to Sunnyvale, and found out more about the project. Along the way, Mike sat me down in his living room and noted that "Paul and I have this idea for a new company for when our commitments are up." I then moved back to USAFA as an instructor, where along with Dick Bolz we developed a course about applying modern software engineering techniques to Ada, a course that we taught all over the United States (including to the contractor for the Sunnyvale system). Meanwhile, in their spare time, Mike and Paul continued their efforts to form a company (Rational Machines), to build a machine that was optimized to run Ada. After securing some venture capital, they were able to hire a number of developers, primarily from Stanford, to begin development.
I recall riding in Mike's Jeep, going with Paul to pick up some of Rational's first blank checks, taking them to Frys and buying some memory chips, after which we celebrated with a gourmet meal at Burger King.
By then, Rational Machines had a small office and had obtained two PDP 20s (named Door and Window) running the ADAS compiler, written in Lisp and developed at Stanford. These machines were replaced by a 2060 to bootstrap development of the Rational Environment development, only later to be replaced by Data General minicomputers for the next increment of bootstrapping. Before those machines, we were using Apple IIs - and I still have mine. Back then, ordering a water cooler was a memorable event. Jump forward to the summer of 1982, and Mike, Paul, and I had completed our commitment. Just to be clear, I'm not a founder: I didn't mortgage my cat to begin the company, but Mike and Paul put their all into the company. I've just been along for the ride since the beginning.
I choose to live in Colorado, and in 1983 finished my first book, Software Engineering with Ada. Around that time, as development of Rational's first product (the R1000) proceeded, I would fly from Denver to San Jose on Monday morning, work pretty much all day and night, then fly home on Friday. For an entire year, I had a car at an airport parking lot somewhere in the world. Finally, in 1985, we release the Rational Environment running on a custom machine we ourselves built, the R1000. The Rational Environment brought to the commercial market tools that today we take for granted: a syntax directed editor, integrated debuggers, build and release tools, all in a windowing environment designed for teams. We built the first commercially validated Ada compiler, which was released through Rolm Corporation. As Dave reported to me, we choose to validate our compiler in order to "disprove the theory that Ada was so complicated that no practical compiler could be built and to prod DEC into productizing their VAX compiler." Around that time, there were serious concerns in the industry that Ada was impractical to implement, and so, as Dave further notes, "we did it to keep Ada from being written off." I didn't do any of the heavy lifting of software development, but I did write the I/O package for the compiler and contributed to the testing effort. Traveling so much, I had my first laptop around 1983, a Grid.
The R1000 was a horizontally microprogrammed machine with a 67 bit single level virtual address space. This machine was in essence a dual stack-based processor, with computation done on one path and type checking on another. The R1000 was effectively a DIANA machine (DIANA being the Descriptive Intermediate Attributed Notation for Ada, a formal intermediate representation for the language). We didn't store source code: source code was simply a pretty-printing of the DIANA tree. Using DIANA with hardware acceleration made it possible to do incremental compilation (unheard of at the time, for strongly typed languages), easy refactoring (though that word had not yet been invented), and incredibly fast integration (essential for the large systems that we being built with Ada).
Given that embedded systems were important in the Ada market , we built a sophisticated host/target compilation system (RCF, the Remove Compilation Facility) which used compilers on the target system. Much later, we partnered with Tartan Laboratories to build cross platform code generators and debuggers. If memory serves me correctly, we sold our first machine - at $1 million per - to Lockheed Corporation. IBM Federal Systems was also a large early customer: IBM really did believe in us from the very beginning. We grew our field organization - I was tech rep #1 - and stated the model of having each team lead by one account representative together with a handful of really technical software engineers. Using the Rational Environment - and Ada - effectively was not just a matter of banging out code, but really did require the proper use of abstraction and information hiding, concepts that we not in the mainstream. Egads, waterfall processes dominated as well (and were even institutionalized in government regulations) and we have to educate our customers about incremental and iterative practices. In 1987, I published my second book, Software Components with Ada, which I liked to call Knuth-in-a-box: I'd written a set of Ada components that codified all the classic data structures and algorithms, just as an exercise to show what good abstraction looked like.
Speaking of Rational's tech reps, Iain reminded me of the Sheep, a semi-regularly published newsletter for the field, full of tips, tricks, and irreverent humor. Iain recalled that "folk lore has it that [the tech rep who started the Sheep] had never seen a sheep in his life and was taken by this strange woolly creature on on of his field visits to Ferranti in Cwmbran, Wales.
By 1990, we had dominated the Ada marketplace and were well-respected for our ability to help customers be successful in developing many complex systems around the world. However, it was also clear that building our own custom hardware didn't make much sense any more. Joe Marasco was then tasked to lead our Apex project, which was a re-engineering of the Rational Environment designed to run on Unix workstations developed by Sun and IBM. Somewhat later, we took that same environment and targeted it to a new language, C++.
And then there was Rose. In 1992, I published my third book, Object-Oriented Design with Applications, which offered a notation and process for building object-oriented software. This work was a continuation of my Ada methodological work, honed from experience with all these large Ada systems. This was a particularly dynamic time in the industry: object-oriented languages abounded, the industry was needing to transition from structured methods to more modern ones, ones that were better suited to the complexity of systems then underway, the Intenet was well-entrenched but Tim Berners-Lee World Wide Web was only then starting to gain traction. I was getting bored of Ada, and because of my book found myself being drawn away from Rational's traditional DoD market into the commercial world. About this time, I did a lecture series with Bjarne Stroustrup. I started toying with some ideas of tooling for my method, the first being what I called the Ada Illustrator, an application that walked over an Ada system and drew what today we'd call an implementation diagram. The server was an R1000 - Dave wrote the code that walked over an applications Diana tree and then passed the structure over a serial link - and the client was a Macintosh (I'd used Apple's MPW as my development environment). That prototype was sufficiently interesting such that I built another prototype, this time in Smaltalk on a laptop. Oh, that reminds me, I gave a demo of the prototype to some IBM executives at the time, literally programming minutes before they arrived. When I started the demo, their first question was "why are you not using an IBM laptop?" I still get asked that question, for I use a Mac PowerBook. My usual response is that "I prefer to use a real operating system." Anyway, that prototype led to Rose (Rational Object-Oriented Software Engineering), our first modeling tool, running on Unix. Rose 1.0 had some serious performance problems, plus the market was rapidly shifting to Windows. We acquired Palladio and retooled their work, such that Rose 2.0 was dominant in the market, supporting both Ada and C++ and running on both Windows and Unix platforms.
In 1994, we acquired Verdix, a move that led to our coming out as public company. I remember around that time a bit of a palace coup with Paul. We had met in the a meeting room at the Red Carpet Club at the old Denver airport, where Mike and Paul began talking about their plans to invest more in the embedded market; I recall politely nodding, but then remarking something to the effect that I thought that was a Really Stupid Idea, and that the real growth opportunity was in the commercial sector. By then - much to the chagrin of Kevin Haar who had taken me on a sales call in New York, I'd publicaly observed that Ada was moribund, and that C++ was going to dominate. Anyway, in that meeting, I suggested we go our separate ways. Mike and Paul talked me off the ledge, and, well, I'm still here.
By 1995, the object-oriented method wars were in full force. We made the strategic move to wage peace by unifying the leading methods. We were already supporting the Booch method, so then we hired Jim Rumbaugh and then one year later, acquired Objectory, Ivar Jacobson's company. Jim, Ivar, and I then worked for another year, culminating in the release of the UML 0.9 spec. The Unified Modeling Language 1.0 specification was submitted to the Object Management Group in January 1997, by the consortium led by Rational but including IBM, DEC, HP i-Logix, IntelliCorp, IBM, MCI, Microsoft, Oracle, and Texas Instruments. To this day I'm utterly amazed at the how we managed to bring together such a diverse group and create such a useful standard. The first really stable version of the UML spec, 1.1, as finally adopted in 1997.
In parallel with the notation and tools work, Philippe Kruchten led a project to deliver the Rational Unified Process.
The presence of Rose changed our position in the market place; among other things, this led to our partnership with Microsoft, which opened our eyes to the PC market. Flush with cash and our growing dominance, Mike and Paul set out on an acquisition strategy to complete their vision of a full-lifecycle set of products. Within a few years, we acquired Requisite, SQA, Performance Awareness, Pure, Atria, and ObjectTime. One other bit of trivia: Reed Hastings, who founded Netflix, had earlier founded Pure (he Rational DNA is strong indeed). In 1999, Rational released Rational Suite, an integrated development for teams. In 2001, Rational formed a new company, Catapulse, with the goal of delivering hosted development services.
Rational's revenue peaked in 2001, flush with cash (over half a billion) and very much a dominant player in the industry. For a number of reasons, Rational's leadership began looking for a buyer, and in 2002, IBM announced its intent to purchase Rational for slightly over $2 billion. The acquisition was consumated exactly five years ago to this day, 20 February 2003.
In those five years as part of the IBM Software Group, Rational has grown stronger. Our business has grown by 40%; we lead the market in application development and project management; our reach is worldwide; our thought leadership continues to drive the industry.
I'm honored to have been and to continue to be a part of Rational.
Quote of the day:
Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was.
Will Rogers
Feb 20 2008, 07:37:00 PM EST
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Ok, And Yet Another Thing
As you might have noticed, I'm cleaning out my blogpile.
A colleague pointed me to Elance, a site for outsourcing to "freelance programmers, web and logo designers, copywriters, illustrators, and consultants." Craiglist is also a source for computer gigs, of course.
Quote of the day:
The other part of outsourcing is this: it simply says where the work can be done outside better than it can be done inside, we should do it.
Alphonso Jackson
Jan 30 2008, 12:00:00 AM EST
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Oh, And Another Thing
Justin Etheredge posted the progammer's dress code here and here. And no, I've not done any commercials for hair care products (although I have done radio voice overs and have been on television).
Quote of the day:
Grey hair is God's graffiti.
Bill Cosby
Jan 29 2008, 03:07:00 PM EST
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Catching U[
Yes the Handbook site is still a wee bit unstable. Apologies for the inconvenience, but my sysadmin (me) is still working to attend to these urgent matters while still trying to make time for the important ones.
Tara5 recently interviewed me here.Tara5/Tish runs a most informative/original site covering virtual worlds.
Quote of the day:
Most people are awaiting virtual reality. I'm awaiting virtuous reality.
Eli Khamarov
Jan 29 2008, 02:53:00 PM EST
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Last Blog Of The Year
As a number of you have reported via email, the Handbook site is still acting funky since its rehosting: login/registration redirects you to the wrong place, some resources are missing, and in general it just behaves tentatively.
Sincerely apologies for the inconvenience: my sysadmin (me) has been thoroughly scolded. His people have reported to my people that he'll have things thriving again after the first of the year.
Quote of the day:
New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights.
Hamilton Mabie
Dec 22 2007, 11:33:50 PM EST
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The Life of a SysAdmin
Two weeks ago, on the 12th of November, I began a process that I though was relatively simple: move my network from one block of IP addresses on an old T1 to a different block of addresses on a new T1.
Silly me. Simple indeed.
I won't mention the name of my circuit provider, but let us just say that it took about 10 days for them to make the DNS changes: one day to properly change the forward records (they got only one of them right, seven of them wrong, they fouled up the reverse mappings, and they forgot the MX record for mail forwarding ) and the remaining nine days to fix the mistakes they made. In the midst of all that - since I was dead in the water anyway - I upgraded my server (a Mac server running Mac OS X Server) to Leopard and that required some fiddling, since Apache and Tomcat were new, less forgiving versions. Anyway, late last night, the planets aligned and I'm back on the grid.
Why the heck don't I outsource my hosting? The basic reason is that I never want to get so far away from the underpinnings of this technology that I lose touch with the gnarly bits that contribute to the friction of computing, friction that is part of the daily life of those in the trenches who keep our systems alive. The software stuff that we deal with is complex enough; the hardware stuff that's at the bottom of the stack has its own complexity and every time it makes itself known, I'm humbled that this stuff works at all, and I admire its resilience in the face of such fragility.
So apologies for any inconvenience that my site being down may have caused you.
Quote of the day:
How many sysadmins does it take to change a light bulb? The bulb was working before. What did you do to break it?
SysAdmin Humor
Nov 29 2007, 12:00:00 AM EST
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Software architecture, software engineering, and Renaissance Jazz
