Platform Wars
vIn 1985, MIS folks looked at PCs seriously for the first time — and they didn’t like what the saw.
²To the MIS folks who were building mission critical apps, PCs were irrelevant. PCs lacked sophisticated time-sharing and transaction oriented operating systems, had no industrial strength databases, no batch-scheduling facilities, no CASE tools, no modern programming languages. AND, the little applications being built had none of the fail-safe mechanisms or design methodologies that MIS folks now knew were critical to creating bullet-proof applications.
vThus arose the cultural split we all live with today.
²A new breed came out of the ‘80s: yesterday teenage hackers and dBase and 1-2-3 programmers have become today’s client/server gurus. Yesterday’s computer club president is today’s network administrator. AND, the two sides still don’t talk to each other, the PC professionals and large system professionals still don’t talk to each other — they have different value systems, different technical backgrounds, and different beliefs.
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