
IBM's future system of the past - fanf2
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/
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msla
Here's another web page on the subject which links to still more:

[https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html](https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html)

That has an interesting quote:

> Note the coverage of FS and what they describe as its "toxic aftereffects"
> on the corporation in Chapter 3 of Charles Ferguson and Charles Morris,
> Computer Wars: The Post-IBM World, Times Books, 1993. An excerpt:

>> Most corrosive of all, the old IBM candor died with F/S. Top management,
particularly Opel, reacted defensively as F/S headed toward a debacle. The IBM
culture that Watson had built was a harsh one, but it encouraged dissent and
open controversy. But because of the heavy investment of face by the top
management, F/S took years to kill, although its wrongheadedness was obvious
from the very outset. "For the first time, during F/S, outspoken criticism
became politically dangerous," recalls a former top executive."

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rst
Several interesting internal documents about FS have recently surfaced at
Bitsavers. See
[http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/futureSystem/](http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/futureSystem/)

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mark_l_watson
Interesting history! I liked the comments about Linux eventually wining, one
guy, Linus, starting something far more impactful than the mountain of work
IBM did on Future System.

A little off topic, but the author of this article John Sowa wrote one of my
favorite technical books a couple of decades ago on the topic of Knowledge
Representation. Really influenced how I thought about information.

~~~
de_watcher
> one guy, Linus, starting something far more impactful

I'd just like to interject for a moment...

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brecalynch
IBM was awarded a patent for blockchain-powered scientific research data. With
it, they aim to make sharing such data more secure and efficient for the
scientific community. This is yet another patent among many for the tech giant
and global leader in blockchain development.

