STRATEGIC VALUE IN COMPUTING

STRATEGIC VALUE IN COMPUTING

By W H Inmon

The other day I was engaging in conversation with a friend. Out of the blue my friend asked me – what single individual has had the greatest, most strategic impact on the computer industry? Would that be Bill Gates? Larry Ellison? Alan Turing? Grace Hopper? Steven Jobs? Ed Yourdon? John Zachman?

That question stopped me to pause and think. Certainly, all of the aforementioned people have had a major and positive impact on the discipline of computation. But when you look at it from the standpoint of what did the world look like before this person made their contribution and what did the world look like after this person left, that is a little bit different way of looking at things.

When you look at major strategic impact on the computer industry, I believe that the person making the single largest impact was a man named Dr Gene Amdahl. I know that this is subjective, but I believe that Dr Gene Amdahl has had the largest impact on our lives and our industry of anyone.

So what did Gene Amdahl do? (I ask this question because I doubt that many of you even know who Gene Amdahl is.) Dr Amdahl was a hardware engineer that figured out that there could be a standard instruction set inside the computer. Once there was a standard instruction set inside a computer, the same software could be run on multiple machines.

(I know this is hard to imagine, but I am going to depict the world for you prior to Gene Amdahl’s discovery.) Once upon a time there were computers. These early computers were each designed to be a one-off product. The internal instruction set of each computer was different from each other computer. This meant that each computer had to be individually programmed. A program that worked on one computer would not work on any other computer. The operating system for each computer had to be uniquely and individually customized for that computer and that computer alone. Imagine how many programmers the world would have needed if – today – every computer required its own individual program. And just image the nightmare in maintenance that implies.

Once Dr Amdahl made his observation, he profoundly changed the entire computer profession. Now a program would run on a computer. And if you didn’t like it, you could go run the program on another computer. Stated differently, as important as Bill Gates has been to the computer industry, Bill Gates couldn’t have made a nickel if it hadn’t of been for Gene Amdahl.

After Gene Amdahl you had something called portability of software on computers. Your investment in software was safe if you needed to upgrade a computer or you wanted to switch vendors. Prior to Gene Amdahl there was no portability of software across computers. We take portability of software for granted, but once it was not so.

The effect of Gene Amdahl’s efforts and contributions have had an enormous impact on the computer industry.

On a side note – many years ago, I had the pleasure and honor of working directly for Gene Amdahl. I worked for and directly communicated with Dr Amdahl on a daily basis. Here are some of my impressions of him as a person –

??Very smart

??A leader

??A lone wolf in the industry

??A very kind person, someone you could talk to if you needed to.

At the time that I knew Dr Amdahl, there was a popular song by Bob Seger – “Against the wind.” We used to tell Dr Amdahl that that song was written for him. He liked that.

I treasure the memories I have of Dr Amdahl.

Bill Inmon lives in Colorado. Bill is known as the father of the data warehouse. Bill has written 62 books. One of Bill’s books has sold over 500,000 copies worldwide. Bill developed textual ETL which reads raw text and turns the text into a standard data base. Bill’s company – Forest Rim Technology – builds and services textual ETL.