Yup. I worked with a client on a startup projdect, and they couldn't afford to pay me, so I arranged for them to pay me 2 for 1 in stock options. Of course, I had to qualify for these options, since I was not an employee.
they had a good product and went public. The options were for.07 cents per share, and I had a bunch of them, becuase they couldn't afford to pay my bills. when they went public, they hit 228 on the first day and I dumped everything in one big dump. Okay, so my cost was $0.07/share and I sold at a profit. Yeeehahh!
Let's talk about how we have done well on this stock, and must now deal with the guilt of it all...
If I was gonna do one of those "hold for 5 years" things, I would be screwed royally. It is a good thing I didn't do that, eh?"
What I did, instead, was to blow all of this off and find a simple way to Do what needs to be done. If you touch me, I will kill you.
does this make any sense to y9ou.? I'm sorry, I cannot handle this stuff. If You touch me, I will kill you. I learned to do this a long time ago. I am not saying this gratuitously. You know that I am not. I will rip things up. I will will rip things up if they are not right.
1) no problem. tell me about motivation.
2) how excited are you? If your fellow workers are also excited, then I predict success.
3) I understand. You cannot talk about this. Your effor will help in this effort.
4) I think that I understand. Your efforts don't mean much unless others also have impact.
5) Yup, what you do has a major impact.
6) Ohmigowd. Ownership of a private company is worth more than ownership of a public company.
Well said. This is the best advice that I have seen here, yet, in this catagory.
Yes, it is very important to differentiate between ISOs and NQSOs. It is also very important to save all of that paperwork, the company sends out (hopefully). As a stock owner, it will always be important to be able to compute the basis for any stock for tax purposes. This is not always an easy computation. In fact, it can get pretty obtuse.
Re: your number 3, I agree completely. In one case that involved me, the buyer payed 5/3 shares of stock to buy the company. So, I got 5 shares of their stock for every share that I owned in the company that was purchased. This was a great deal.
In other such transactions, I saw a 1/5 ratio, where I got one share of the buying company's stock for each share I held in the bought company.
Make sure you read the agreement very very closely. There are probably time limits involved and other criteria. These are really important issues that you need to know.
Let me give you an example from a friend. She had worked for this company since there were less than 40 employees, and had much stock options. They were then bought by a BIG player in a different industry. The stock deal was great. It was 1.3 shares per share and covered both ISOs and NQSOs. But there was a time limit involved, to exercise. There was also a condition written into the agreement, that if a employee, whose previous employee was less than X in the old company, was asked to do anything that "meteriorly changed their job function," their stock options would be accellerated to the point where they would be fully vested immediately and forced to exercise these options or lose them within six months.
Yikes, what a thing to encounter in this market. It would already take more than the reserves we have set aside to resolve this.
Why does the AMT tax hurt so many people?
I did not see a single dollar in income, yet I have to pay tax on what might have been. Wht wukk these Rubublicans not fix this problem? It is so easy to fix. Why not?
This works for some stocks and not for others. A year or so ago, I played the Linux related IPOs. I flipped enough of each on the first day bounce to cover the investment and then watched the charts on streaming updates to determine how much profit to take and when to take it. My goal was to be a long term owner of stock in some of the companies in which I believed, but not to the extent of taking a loss.
This strategy seemed to work. I still own stock in Red Hat and VA Linux, but haven't lost a dime. I also rode the Corel Linux release and got a nifty little profit from it, but sold on the downswing (and was never sorry about that).
But for ISOs and NQSOs, the situation is quite different. How many folks are there out there that exercised and then decided to wait for the long term capital gains tax, and got totally screwed because of it? Among friends and neighbors, I can name two dozen off the top of my head.
The worst case is a friend that exercised at $120/share and decided to hold off the year before selling any. He exercised on a margin loan, so he got hit by AMT and also lost the rest of his portfolio. This coming April 15th, he will owe almost $700,000 in AMT, and has already lost his daughter's college fund and will be losing his house soon. He never saw a single dime in profit from exercising his stock, but owes $700,000 in taxes on it. Oh, the stock is now trading at more than $100/share less than his strike price. It is trading at less than the capitalization of its hard assets. This stock will come back, but it will be too late for him.
I recommended an exercise and flip strategy that would have immediately sold enough stock to cover the taxes and the margin loan. Sigh. When that approach didn't work, I suggested a collar (this is where a stockholder bets with others that the stock will not go below a certain point or above a certain point - it is a form of insurance), then I arranged for him to talk to a prominant stock loan company. They would give him cash in exchange for his stock. If the stock went down, during the period of the loan, he just kept the cash. If the stock went up during this period, he could buy back his stock at the original price, plus a relatively small fee.
Why doesn't anyone listen. Is it all these grey hairs? How do you think I got these? LOL... I got them by making mistakes on my own, but I learned each time, before I learned how to learn from the mistakes of others.
Anyone want to buy 10,000 shares of Synsesis for a penny a share? How about a penny per thousand shares? Okay, how about a penny for the whole lot? Now, wait a minute, that stock certificate looks soooo good in my bathroom. Maybe, I'lll just keep it for awhile.
The really funny thing is that I was going to use another company name in that sentence, but I suddenly discovered that they are still in business and maybe even doing well. As you might guess, I am investigating....
Short cap is the financial world's way of telling you to cover your ass. You pay extra to cover your ass, just as you pay extra for insurance in any aspect of life.
Well said. I see it as an incentive to put in that extra effort to make sure the product is sucessful. Of course, this only works if all within the company are equally motivated, or at least equally motivated at their level of responsibility.
You're right about a couple of things. Cisco is a great buy right now, as are a few others in related market space. Bandwidth needs are increasing, and networks are coming closer to saturation. There is only so long that customers can afford to hold out before buying more equipment and fiber.
The stock market is a total gamble the way that betting on a chess match is a total gamble. As soon as one loses a rook, there will be moaning and gnashing of teeth and many will bail, leaving more profit opportunities for those who have a planned strategy.
I wouldn't be so confident about the value of land as a long term investment. The value of land is tied to an increasing population. Check the population trends for the top 5 industrialized nations. All but the US are in UN stage 4 and declining in population. The US would be in the same situation, but for immigration.
If you look at the historical statistics of the stock market, you will find that it has appreciated more than land, even if you include the Great Depression and all recessions. Forget the idiots. They have correctly predicted at least 20 of the past 3 recessions. Look a the data and develop a plan based on that data. Look at who goes up every time Cisco goes down. There is a pretty clear pattern here. Use it to your advantage.
The ease of use issue need not be a big problem. You can throw together some quick VBA code to modify how MS Word opens and closes documents, to handle transparent checkin and checkout operations. The same is true for Excel, and (I believe) PowerPoint. Using the same technique, you could also switch the default file format to RTF for word. Thus the documentation folks would not even be aware of the versioning, unless they attempted to open a locked file.
RTF can easily be handled by CVS, so there would be no problem there. If I remember correctly, Word supports embeddable data fields, and this can be used to synchronize document versions with software versions, as well as handling the various scheduling and life-cycle data that the docs folks need. For Excel, this data can be stored in standardized grid locations that are outside the displayed or printed boundaries defined. I don't know about PowerPoint.
If the docs department has not already done so, they would have to make use of "master documents" to control the full publication, so each writer, illustrator, etc., is working with a relatively small file that covers no more than one chapter or section of a document. This is the only way that file locking will work successfully.
One person in the docs department would have to learn WinCVS, or some other GUI front-end, to be able to resolve the occasional problem (or they can just contact your CVS person). There would also have to be a few standards imposed, such as closing a file when leaving for the day. But these are very easy to implement. You could even use VBA to force a save and file close after x hours of inactivity and generate a message or email to the docs writer to explain what happened.
I strongly advise against using a separate version control system for software devel and tech docs, since this would only complicate coordinating the right software versions with the corresponding tech docs versions. If you make it transparent, then each tech docs professional is doing things the way that they know how, but the underlying mechanism is doing what needs to be done to implement proper version control, and synchronization with software versions.
If your company is on a tight budget, this is the way to go. Not only can you resolve your problems with a minimum of expenditure (a day or two of programming time), but you can also sell your VBA code to other companies with the same problem (or to one of the companies that specializes in such things), or donate it to become part of the CVS repertoire.
We all know that programmers write code that is so tight that QA departments have never been necessary, and that QA groups are so good that no product has ever been released with bugs. Right? And when fixing a bug, the new code never breaks anything else in the product. Right?
We also know that database code is so tight that no problems will result from importing data with an erroneous field that fits the range check.
Some companies are actually fixing the problem, by changing the size of the date field. Others are "fixing" the problem by making assumptions about dates and leaving the date field as two digits. Some countries are far behind in their attempts to resolve the problem and many small businesses will not have upgraded their software or data in the next month. All of these will be sharing data, to some degree.
The real problem is the short-sightedness of some managers, who are sure that no code will still be in use when their short-term "fixes" hit their magic dates. This mentality is what caused them to ignore the problem for the past 25+ years, despite the warnings, and even to develop non-compliant software products as recently as a year or two ago.
While I don't expect to see planes falling from the sky or the power grid collapsing at midnight, I expect to see y2k related problems for a long time to come.
Microsoft recognized the value of UNIX more than 20 years ago and purchased a source license to UNIX with the intention of porting it to home computers. They hired a bunch a UNIX programmers and set out to bring UNIX to the home computer desktop. They did this even before the big contract with IBM for MS-DOS.
The version 1.0 of MS-DOS was really GazelleDOS and it very closely emulated CP/M, with a flat file system. It was only designed to fill the gap until CP/M-86 came out. After that fateful put-down by Digital Research and IBM's approach to Microsoft, and Microsoft's subsequent purchase of all rights to GazelleDOS, this primitive OS was turned over to the UNIX programmers.
They added many of the features that UNIX folks have come to take for granted. They added hierarchal file systems, command line redirection, etc. etc. They won on every single design concept except the slash vs backslash. Supposedly, there was a major client who used the slash for parameter deliniation.
But, the effects of the UNIX programmers profoundly changed MS-DOS. I was working in a situation where my client had source licenses to both Ms_DOS v1 and v2. The difference what huge. Since I was doing UNIX programming for other clients, I immediately recognized the change and the potential impact.
Once MS-DOS became a cash cow, the Xenix project went to the back burner. There were already companies signed up by Microsoft to have exclusive rights for a processor family for Xenix.
SCO is the one everyone remembers, but there were others for other processor families. There were many others that provided Xenix for 68000, z8000, 3b2, and other processor.
SCO is the one that survived. It eventually bought out MS's interest and became independant.
But the fact remains that Msoft purchased a source license for UNIX 20 years ago and tried to create a commercial product from it. The UNIX influence shaped much of the Microsoft products for years.
Msoft did thier best, but they could not muster support for Xenix without marketing support. By then, all marketing support would have to be focussed on the products that were making money for them -- MS-DOS.
MS sold their interest in SCO, because it was in competion with some of their products.
But, let's give them credit where credit is due. Microft put some good programmers to fixing the problems with MD-DOS v1.
Xenix was Microsoft's project to sell UNIX for home computers. It goes 'way back (it was the UNIX programmers of the Msoft staff that added all of the unix-like features in MS-DOS v2).
Microsoft purchased a source license to UNIX and hired some UNIX programmers. They set up exclusive agreements with some outside companies to port and support various platforms. At one time there were 68000 and Z8000 versions of Xenix out there.
SCO had the exclusive x86 Xenix license. Msoft was a part owner of the company, until it sold its interest.
The Hamilton Group was a collaboration of some of the major UNIX players to counteract the threat that Sun would have too great an influence of the future of official UNIX. It was formed in response to an announcement that subsequent releases of UNIX would be ported to Sun platforms first.
It got its name from Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto, the location of DEC WRL, WSE, and WSL.
Twenty-five years ago, the experts predicted that the number of programming and software design jobs would steadily decrease. The rationale was that as the tools improved and computer skills became more prevalent, experts in other fields would be writing the applications and that IT folks would only be needed to improve the tools.
Now, the experts are predicting the same thing regarding tools for Internet applications.
Meanwhile, the end users are still waiting for the productivity increases that would come from applications that allow them to do things the way they do them, rather then forcing them to change to adapt to the rigid structures enforced by the application software.
The users have been thwarted by a succession of monopolies who have a financial interest in resisting significant change.
I see hope in the current situation - not frustration or despair. We all know that the best software developers prefer to work on projects that interest them. Is it a coincidence that Open Source software is seeing a resurgence at the same time when so many good software folks are attaining relative financial independence? I think not.
Look what some of the large software companies are doing to coax these folks into working for them - paid sabaticals to work on "personal" projects, relaxing the rules about work done in "free time", making company computer resources available for Open Source projects, etc. This is real progress.
Look at the benefits being reaped, world-wide by such software efforts as Grass, as an example of how this software improves the life of many. Data presented through Grass has help with flooding predictions, drought predictions, pollution control, and many other areas. Now that Grass has been released through the GPL, I expect that it will improve significantly, especially in the UI area.
The next step, of course is to free the data. This is increasingly important at a time where some are trying to lock it up and make it only available to a select few and at a high price. But awareness can thwart this move and make the data available to the public.
I am optomistic. Even the discussion here and articles such as the one today in Silicon Valley Life play an important part in shaping the concept of social responsibility (and opportunity) for IT professionals.
Even here in Silicon Valley, where almost no one wears a suit, the term is used often to identify those who profit from others' designs and engineering, as opposed to those that do the design and engineering.
It is not always a term of derision. But it is almost often used in context of "us vs them". It is not very much different from the longhairs vs rednecks terms from the '60s. Very few of those who had shorter hair in the '60s fell into the stereotypes of what are now called rednecks. The term was coined because of stereotypes. The same thing is true today, with the "suits" stereotype.
I am a software developer, but I have worked with some very very sharp marketing, finance, and senior management folks who have made dreams come true for a lot of engineers.
I still call them "suits", because their function is to deal with the business realities that I choose not to work with. But I respect the good ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. I worked with a client on a startup projdect, and they couldn't afford to pay me, so I arranged for them to pay me 2 for 1 in stock options. Of course, I had to qualify for these options, since I was not an employee.
.07 cents per share, and I had a bunch of them, becuase they couldn't afford to pay my bills. when they went public, they hit 228 on the first day and I dumped everything in one big dump. Okay, so my cost was $0.07 /share and I sold at a profit. Yeeehahh!
they had a good product and went public. The options were for
Let's talk about how we have done well on this stock, and must now deal with the guilt of it all...
If I was gonna do one of those "hold for 5 years" things, I would be screwed royally. It is a good thing I didn't do that, eh?"
What I did, instead, was to blow all of this off and find a simple way to Do what needs to be done. If you touch me, I will kill you.
does this make any sense to y9ou.? I'm sorry, I cannot handle this stuff. If You touch me, I will kill you. I learned to do this a long time ago. I am not saying this gratuitously. You know that I am not. I will rip things up. I will will rip things up if they are not right.
1) no problem. tell me about motivation.
2) how excited are you? If your fellow workers are also excited, then I predict success.
3) I understand. You cannot talk about this. Your effor will help in this effort.
4) I think that I understand. Your efforts don't mean much unless others also have impact.
5) Yup, what you do has a major impact.
6) Ohmigowd. Ownership of a private company is worth more than ownership of a public company.
Well said. This is the best advice that I have seen here, yet, in this catagory.
Yes, it is very important to differentiate between ISOs and NQSOs. It is also very important to save all of that paperwork, the company sends out (hopefully). As a stock owner, it will always be important to be able to compute the basis for any stock for tax purposes. This is not always an easy computation. In fact, it can get pretty obtuse.
Re: your number 3, I agree completely. In one case that involved me, the buyer payed 5/3 shares of stock to buy the company. So, I got 5 shares of their stock for every share that I owned in the company that was purchased. This was a great deal.
In other such transactions, I saw a 1/5 ratio, where I got one share of the buying company's stock for each share I held in the bought company.
Make sure you read the agreement very very closely. There are probably time limits involved and other criteria. These are really important issues that you need to know.
Let me give you an example from a friend. She had worked for this company since there were less than 40 employees, and had much stock options. They were then bought by a BIG player in a different industry. The stock deal was great. It was 1.3 shares per share and covered both ISOs and NQSOs. But there was a time limit involved, to exercise. There was also a condition written into the agreement, that if a employee, whose previous employee was less than X in the old company, was asked to do anything that "meteriorly changed their job function," their stock options would be accellerated to the point where they would be fully vested immediately and forced to exercise these options or lose them within six months.
Yikes, what a thing to encounter in this market. It would already take more than the reserves we have set aside to resolve this.
Why does the AMT tax hurt so many people?
I did not see a single dollar in income, yet I have to pay tax on what might have been. Wht wukk these Rubublicans not fix this problem? It is so easy to fix. Why not?
No one will read this anyhow. it is old newz
This works for some stocks and not for others. A year or so ago, I played the Linux related IPOs. I flipped enough of each on the first day bounce to cover the investment and then watched the charts on streaming updates to determine how much profit to take and when to take it. My goal was to be a long term owner of stock in some of the companies in which I believed, but not to the extent of taking a loss.
This strategy seemed to work. I still own stock in Red Hat and VA Linux, but haven't lost a dime. I also rode the Corel Linux release and got a nifty little profit from it, but sold on the downswing (and was never sorry about that).
But for ISOs and NQSOs, the situation is quite different. How many folks are there out there that exercised and then decided to wait for the long term capital gains tax, and got totally screwed because of it? Among friends and neighbors, I can name two dozen off the top of my head.
The worst case is a friend that exercised at $120/share and decided to hold off the year before selling any. He exercised on a margin loan, so he got hit by AMT and also lost the rest of his portfolio. This coming April 15th, he will owe almost $700,000 in AMT, and has already lost his daughter's college fund and will be losing his house soon. He never saw a single dime in profit from exercising his stock, but owes $700,000 in taxes on it. Oh, the stock is now trading at more than $100/share less than his strike price. It is trading at less than the capitalization of its hard assets. This stock will come back, but it will be too late for him.
I recommended an exercise and flip strategy that would have immediately sold enough stock to cover the taxes and the margin loan. Sigh. When that approach didn't work, I suggested a collar (this is where a stockholder bets with others that the stock will not go below a certain point or above a certain point - it is a form of insurance), then I arranged for him to talk to a prominant stock loan company. They would give him cash in exchange for his stock. If the stock went down, during the period of the loan, he just kept the cash. If the stock went up during this period, he could buy back his stock at the original price, plus a relatively small fee.
Why doesn't anyone listen. Is it all these grey hairs? How do you think I got these? LOL... I got them by making mistakes on my own, but I learned each time, before I learned how to learn from the mistakes of others.
Anyone want to buy 10,000 shares of Synsesis for a penny a share? How about a penny per thousand shares? Okay, how about a penny for the whole lot? Now, wait a minute, that stock certificate looks soooo good in my bathroom. Maybe, I'lll just keep it for awhile.
The really funny thing is that I was going to use another company name in that sentence, but I suddenly discovered that they are still in business and maybe even doing well. As you might guess, I am investigating....
Short cap is the financial world's way of telling you to cover your ass. You pay extra to cover your ass, just as you pay extra for insurance in any aspect of life.
Well said. I see it as an incentive to put in that extra effort to make sure the product is sucessful. Of course, this only works if all within the company are equally motivated, or at least equally motivated at their level of responsibility.
You're right about a couple of things. Cisco is a great buy right now, as are a few others in related market space. Bandwidth needs are increasing, and networks are coming closer to saturation. There is only so long that customers can afford to hold out before buying more equipment and fiber.
The stock market is a total gamble the way that betting on a chess match is a total gamble. As soon as one loses a rook, there will be moaning and gnashing of teeth and many will bail, leaving more profit opportunities for those who have a planned strategy.
I wouldn't be so confident about the value of land as a long term investment. The value of land is tied to an increasing population. Check the population trends for the top 5 industrialized nations. All but the US are in UN stage 4 and declining in population. The US would be in the same situation, but for immigration.
If you look at the historical statistics of the stock market, you will find that it has appreciated more than land, even if you include the Great Depression and all recessions. Forget the idiots. They have correctly predicted at least 20 of the past 3 recessions. Look a the data and develop a plan based on that data. Look at who goes up every time Cisco goes down. There is a pretty clear pattern here. Use it to your advantage.
I think you will find that this discussion is about ISOs and NQSOs, rather than puts and calls. The mechanics and implications are quite different.
The ease of use issue need not be a big problem. You can throw together some quick VBA code to modify how MS Word opens and closes documents, to handle transparent checkin and checkout operations. The same is true for Excel, and (I believe) PowerPoint. Using the same technique, you could also switch the default file format to RTF for word. Thus the documentation folks would not even be aware of the versioning, unless they attempted to open a locked file.
RTF can easily be handled by CVS, so there would be no problem there. If I remember correctly, Word supports embeddable data fields, and this can be used to synchronize document versions with software versions, as well as handling the various scheduling and life-cycle data that the docs folks need. For Excel, this data can be stored in standardized grid locations that are outside the displayed or printed boundaries defined. I don't know about PowerPoint.
If the docs department has not already done so, they would have to make use of "master documents" to control the full publication, so each writer, illustrator, etc., is working with a relatively small file that covers no more than one chapter or section of a document. This is the only way that file locking will work successfully.
One person in the docs department would have to learn WinCVS, or some other GUI front-end, to be able to resolve the occasional problem (or they can just contact your CVS person). There would also have to be a few standards imposed, such as closing a file when leaving for the day. But these are very easy to implement. You could even use VBA to force a save and file close after x hours of inactivity and generate a message or email to the docs writer to explain what happened.
I strongly advise against using a separate version control system for software devel and tech docs, since this would only complicate coordinating the right software versions with the corresponding tech docs versions. If you make it transparent, then each tech docs professional is doing things the way that they know how, but the underlying mechanism is doing what needs to be done to implement proper version control, and synchronization with software versions.
If your company is on a tight budget, this is the way to go. Not only can you resolve your problems with a minimum of expenditure (a day or two of programming time), but you can also sell your VBA code to other companies with the same problem (or to one of the companies that specializes in such things), or donate it to become part of the CVS repertoire.
We all know that programmers write code that is so tight that QA departments have never been necessary, and that QA groups are so good that no product has ever been released with bugs. Right? And when fixing a bug, the new code never breaks anything else in the product. Right?
We also know that database code is so tight that no problems will result from importing data with an erroneous field that fits the range check.
Some companies are actually fixing the problem, by changing the size of the date field. Others are "fixing" the problem by making assumptions about dates and leaving the date field as two digits. Some countries are far behind in their attempts to resolve the problem and many small businesses will not have upgraded their software or data in the next month. All of these will be sharing data, to some degree.
The real problem is the short-sightedness of some managers, who are sure that no code will still be in use when their short-term "fixes" hit their magic dates. This mentality is what caused them to ignore the problem for the past 25+ years, despite the warnings, and even to develop non-compliant software products as recently as a year or two ago.
While I don't expect to see planes falling from the sky or the power grid collapsing at midnight, I expect to see y2k related problems for a long time to come.
--doc
Microsoft recognized the value of UNIX more than 20 years ago and purchased a source license to UNIX with the intention of porting it to home computers. They hired a bunch a UNIX programmers and set out to bring UNIX to the home computer desktop. They did this even before the big contract with IBM for MS-DOS.
The version 1.0 of MS-DOS was really GazelleDOS and it very closely emulated CP/M, with a flat file system. It was only designed to fill the gap until CP/M-86 came out. After that fateful put-down by Digital Research and IBM's approach to Microsoft, and Microsoft's subsequent purchase of all rights to GazelleDOS, this primitive OS was turned over to the UNIX programmers.
They added many of the features that UNIX folks have come to take for granted. They added hierarchal file systems, command line redirection, etc. etc. They won on every single design concept except the slash vs backslash. Supposedly, there was a major client who used the slash for parameter deliniation.
But, the effects of the UNIX programmers profoundly changed MS-DOS. I was working in a situation where my client had source licenses to both Ms_DOS v1 and v2. The difference what huge. Since I was doing UNIX programming for other clients, I immediately recognized the change and the potential impact.
Once MS-DOS became a cash cow, the Xenix project went to the back burner. There were already companies signed up by Microsoft to have exclusive rights for a processor family for Xenix.
SCO is the one everyone remembers, but there were others for other processor families. There were many others that provided Xenix for 68000, z8000, 3b2, and other processor.
SCO is the one that survived. It eventually bought out MS's interest and became independant.
But the fact remains that Msoft purchased a source license for UNIX 20 years ago and tried to create a commercial product from it. The UNIX influence shaped much of the Microsoft products for years.
Msoft did thier best, but they could not muster support for Xenix without marketing support. By then, all marketing support would have to be focussed on the products that were making money for them -- MS-DOS.
MS sold their interest in SCO, because it was in competion with some of their products.
But, let's give them credit where credit is due. Microft put some good programmers to fixing the problems with MD-DOS v1.
SCO would not exist, if it were not for Msoft.
Hee hee hee. I just pulled out my copy a few days ago, and was laughing at some of my notes in the margins and papers stuffed between pages.
:-)
Oh, and I didn't steal my copy. I was a subscriber at the time. Was that really 21 years ago? It seems like only yesterday.
Actually, Bill Gates didn't buy SCO.
Xenix was Microsoft's project to sell UNIX for home computers. It goes 'way back (it was the UNIX programmers of the Msoft staff that added all of the unix-like features in MS-DOS v2).
Microsoft purchased a source license to UNIX and hired some UNIX programmers. They set up exclusive agreements with some outside companies to port and support various platforms. At one time there were 68000 and Z8000 versions of Xenix out there.
SCO had the exclusive x86 Xenix license. Msoft was a part owner of the company, until it sold its interest.
The Hamilton Group was a collaboration of some of the major UNIX players to counteract the threat that Sun would have too great an influence of the future of official UNIX. It was formed in response to an announcement that subsequent releases of UNIX would be ported to Sun platforms first.
It got its name from Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto, the location of DEC WRL, WSE, and WSL.
Twenty-five years ago, the experts predicted that the number of programming and software design jobs would steadily decrease. The rationale was that as the tools improved and computer skills became more prevalent, experts in other fields would be writing the applications and that IT folks would only be needed to improve the tools.
Now, the experts are predicting the same thing regarding tools for Internet applications.
Meanwhile, the end users are still waiting for the productivity increases that would come from applications that allow them to do things the way they do them, rather then forcing them to change to adapt to the rigid structures enforced by the application software.
The users have been thwarted by a succession of monopolies who have a financial interest in resisting significant change.
I see hope in the current situation - not frustration or despair. We all know that the best software developers prefer to work on projects that interest them. Is it a coincidence that Open Source software is seeing a resurgence at the same time when so many good software folks are attaining relative financial independence? I think not.
Look what some of the large software companies are doing to coax these folks into working for them - paid sabaticals to work on "personal" projects, relaxing the rules about work done in "free time", making company computer resources available for Open Source projects, etc. This is real progress.
Look at the benefits being reaped, world-wide by such software efforts as Grass, as an example of how this software improves the life of many. Data presented through Grass has help with flooding predictions, drought predictions, pollution control, and many other areas. Now that Grass has been released through the GPL, I expect that it will improve significantly, especially in the UI area.
The next step, of course is to free the data. This is increasingly important at a time where some are trying to lock it up and make it only available to a select few and at a high price. But awareness can thwart this move and make the data available to the public.
I am optomistic. Even the discussion here and articles such as the one today in Silicon Valley Life play an important part in shaping the concept of social responsibility (and opportunity) for IT professionals.
--doc
Even here in Silicon Valley, where almost no one wears a suit, the term is used often to identify those who profit from others' designs and engineering, as opposed to those that do the design and engineering.
It is not always a term of derision. But it is almost often used in context of "us vs them". It is not very much different from the longhairs vs rednecks terms from the '60s. Very few of those who had shorter hair in the '60s fell into the stereotypes of what are now called rednecks. The term was coined because of stereotypes. The same thing is true today, with the "suits" stereotype.
I am a software developer, but I have worked with some very very sharp marketing, finance, and senior management folks who have made dreams come true for a lot of engineers.
I still call them "suits", because their function is to deal with the business realities that I choose not to work with. But I respect the good ones.
--dh