I agree with William Blair in that many things we masses are sold and forced to use seem never to have been given the benefit of a stress test, a focus group, or the "pick an average man on the street and see if he can use it" reality check. But I can also see how a high-level executive would expect that IBM would sell hundreds of times as many 327x terminals to end users, mostly women in admin/clerical jobs, as they would to programmers, historically mostly men, using a slicked-up layer of externals (ISPF) to make the stabilized, user-surly TSO usable by serious computer professionals. The sheer numbers of potential users in each of these two categories would dictate all marketing decisions.
IBM makes extremely complex computer equipment, and we techies salivate as we delve into the intricacies of the 8th- and 9th-level caching effects on instruction performance. IBM builds these complex toys with which we techies love to play, but big executives in IBM, just like their stockholders, could care less about how much we computer geeks salivate over what we think of as toys. IBM wants their complex business machines to be sold to big businesses that need machines and to be ultimately used by a vast army of woefully technically ignorant end-users who work for those big businesses and who don't care about the technical details or how many PFkeys are on the keyboard. All those users want to know is does the keyboard have enough weird keys for them to do their data entry jobs. John Gilmore would correctly describe the attitude of that woman executive at GUIDE as "provincial." I think what I am trying to say is that top executives at IBM do not make "computer" decisions. They make "business" decisions, and the main business of IBM is to make profits. They just happen to be using computers for the last 60 years as a means to that end. Bill Fairchild Rocket Software -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:ibm-m...@bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of Eric Bielefeld Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2010 5:06 PM To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu Subject: Re: Set numbers off permanently. Very interesting. I started around 1979 with SPF. I remember having a hard time getting it to work right, mostly because my 3277 terminal had only 5 PFKeys. When I figured out that I should set PF4 & PF5 to scroll down and up, it got a lot easier. -- Eric Bielefeld Systems Programmer ---- "William H. Blair" <wmhbl...@comcast.net> wrote: > > It has always amazed me that IBM relentlessly allows idiots > to design stuff (or worse, re-design already-working, well- > done stuff) that they themselves: (a) did not before use, and > (b) would never, ever use (in their job) anyway. The usability > tests for the keyboard PF Key placement decision was conducted > not with programmers, but women (97%) literally "off the street." > Why? Because the "market" for 3270 terminals was thought to be > female clerks entering data into CICS and IMS screens. IBM paid > absolutely NO attention to real programmers or operators during > that testing. An IBM VP admitted this to a large group of us at > GUIDE once. What's so sick about that is that, in a conversation > with her after her presentation, she basically said that our > assertion that "programmers" used 3270 terminals to write code > and debug programs was completely unbelievable. She was unaware > of any such support and "knew" that the transaction monitors > were the only software (other than MVS for consoles) that IBM > offered to work with them. Asked what TSO was, she explained > that she had heard of it, but thought that it was a minor and > mostly-unused, functionally-stabilized product, and it had no > importance whatsoever in IBM product plans. (That last part > was, in fact, true -- as far as IBM was concerned.) > > Where and how IBM comes up with these morons has never ceased to > amaze me. > > -- > WB ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
