It's Friday, right? After the release of Mel Brooks' History of the World Part I, he was often asked when we could expect to see Part II. He claimed never to have intended a Part II. Then why call it Part I? Because that qualifier is almost never used. The first one is called Name; the next one is Name II or Name Part 2. If you think about our biz, we do the same thing. We name all sorts of elements and components such that the first one gets a vanilla name; the next one--usually not contemplated in the original design--gets various kinds of qualifications. The idea of naming the very first one with a 'two' is fallout from modern marketing obfuscation, where ordinary logic is irrelevant or downright inimical.
. . . J.O.Skip Robinson Southern California Edison Company Electric Dragon Team Paddler SHARE MVS Program Co-Manager 323-715-0595 Mobile jo.skip.robin...@att.net jo.skip.robin...@gmail.com > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] > On Behalf Of Pommier, Rex > Sent: Friday, January 22, 2016 09:05 AM > To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU > Subject: [Bulk] Re: Compile error > > Probably just an old fairy tale, but I was told long ago that DB2 came about as a > name because IBM already had IMS so the 2 in DB2 was to distinguish it as > being IBM's second DBMS offering. > > Rex > > -----Original Message----- > From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] > On Behalf Of Skip Robinson > Sent: Friday, January 22, 2016 10:51 AM > To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU > Subject: Re: Compile error > > The name 'DB2' seems to have followed the 1980s tradition of what I call 'name > bloat', the practice of inflating a moniker in one way or another to make a > product look more mature or more elegant. The paragon in my mind was > dBASE II from Ashton-Tate. There never was a plain old dBASE. The roman > numeral was added from the get-go to make the product seem new and > improved. > Moreover, there was never an 'Ashton'. That name was invented because, gosh > darn it, it sounded good hyphenated with Tate, a real person. > > Before DB2 there was precedent for name bloat within IBM. There never was a > plain old 'JES'. The product emerged from the cocoon as JES2. There had been a > predecessor product called 'HASP', which may or may not have been an > acronym for Houston Automatic Spooling Priority, but the name 'J-E-S' was > born complete with suffix. > > Meanwhile there did emerge a 'JES3', but it was not an evolutionary > descendant of JES2. Both products have coexisted, albeit uneasily, for decades. > We used to imagine a JES5 or JES6 (depending on one's arithmetic > proclivity) that would somehow combine the best features of both products, > but it's almost certainly DOA. Likewise, the prospects for a 'DB3' are as dim as a > distant star. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
