[TUHS] Re: Has this been discussed on-list? How Unix changed Software.

[steve jenkin <sjenkin@canb.auug.org.au>]

Marc,

the first I.T. Recession in Australia occurred in 1991.
It was the first economic recession where corporates couldn’t easily save money by “automating” - all the low-hanging fruit - like Inventory, Payroll & Accounting - had been computerised, at least by companies that’d survive.

Thanks for mentioning the IBM OCO - I’d left mainframe by then.

Your insight about the ’social contract’ ring true - never heard that before.
Since that first recession, the regard managers have for I.T. / Computing staff - embodied in wages & conditions - has declined markedly outside business where software & systems are their business.
The hype and over-expenditure on Y2K, then the Dot Crash, resulted in a 5 year I.T. recession in Australia - and a very jaded attitude towards I.T. and their budgets within the Corporates I know.

The deskilling and mediocre work of programmers and support staff alike doesn’t seem to improve whole-of-enterprise productivity.

Your summation of the Professional response to the dissolution of the ’social contract’ is very insightful. Explains the rapid rise and proliferation of OSS in the 1990’s.

stevej

> On 7 Sep 2022, at 02:09, Marc Donner <marc.donner@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> By the mid-1980s the Microsoft folks established the notion that software was economically valuable.  People stopped giving away source code (IBM's change in strategy was called OCO - "Object Code Only") and it totally shocked the software developer community by destroying the jobs for programmers at user sites.  Combine that with the mid-1980s recession and the first layoffs that programmers had ever seen and we saw the first horrified realization that the social contract between programmers and employers did not actually exist.
> 
> We, the programmer community, woke up and committed ourselves as much as ever we could to non-proprietary languages and tools, putting our shoulders to the OSS movement and hence to UNIX and the layer of tools built on top of it.
> 

--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 
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