Re: What ever happened to... DEC?

[Aron Insinga <ainsinga@infomation.com>]

>I remember seeing your name referenced in that book.

Thanks.  The others really did have much better quality information than I
did.  I think that he generously listed us all to point out for future
reference that everyone but Microsoft (and a consultant) ended up on AT&T's
side.  (Or maybe it was just a bribe! :-)  There were other issues during
my 2 years on the committee where I was on the heavy-handed minority side
and stood up for The Process, like invoking the "we didn't have 2 weeks to
study this so we can't vote on it yet" rule, and asking for that disclaimer
(from X3) be put on the cover of the working papers which says that they
are known to contain errors and are not standards or draft standards and so
nobody should claim conformance to them.  (It was embarassing & infuriating
when the other DEC C++ group, on the left coast, claimed conformance to the
working paper for their flavor of the product in some ad.)  It is very
weird trying to use a standards committee as a competitive weapon, and
that's really a large part of what goes on in standards committees these
days.  Very un-computer-scientific/-engineering.  Like Sun getting the
Sparc architecture approved as a standard.  *sigh*.

- Aron