John Golini
Short Bio
After leaving Wang in '79 I worked at BBN in Cambridge for about year doing nothing. Then I moved to San Jose, California to work for Olivetti, supposedly to work on their next generation office system. I ended up being a tools support lacky for a bunch of primadonna Italian programmers. Never did make the promised trip to Italy, thank goodness!In Oct. of '82 I started "The Jay Gee Programming Company" to write games and toys for home computers. It turned out to be a bust since home computers didn't catch on until about 10 years later. So I worked as a contractor/consultant and have been self-employed ever since. I am celebrating my 20th anniversary of not having a job this October.
I live in the Santa Cruz mountains about half way between San Jose and Santa Cruz. I pretty much still work in the 8-bit embedded microcontroller area, writing assembly language and C every day still. You can look at my web site www.msdus.com/jgolini but its pretty boring -- and needs new pictures, the ones that are there are old.
No, wives or ex-wives, no kids, no roommates, pretty much a hermit. Still spend most of my free time watching soap operas, but now-a-days off of my super-duper satellite TIVO system, which makes it easier. I do get down to town at least once a week for business or groceries. I party a lot with my neighbors on weekends and try to play keyboard in their band.
Stories and Anecdotes
Someone recently asked me whether it was better for file names to be case-sensitive or case-insensitive. My answer was quickly, "I don't care".I wrote an operating system/file system back in the 70s, and for the life of me I can't remember whether file names were case-sensitive or not. I remember it being very controversial and all of my enemies/rivals wrote numerous antagonistic, contentious, and downright hostile diatribes on the subject as interoffice memos. I successfully thwarted and fought off all attacks with vehement and vociferous counter-arguments. It got so that if the subject would come up at a meeting, Harold would just adjourn immediately and run screaming from the room.
I was sure, I was adamant, and I knew all the arguments on both sides. I was impertinent, arrogant, belligerent, and conceited, totally and absolutely sure of my position. But now, 25 years later, I can't remember which side I was on. I suppose I could go look it up in the old OS-6 document. Its out in my garage somewhere. But I really don't care.
OK, you guys made me go hunting in my garage for the documents. I found two big volumes of OS-[0-9]+ documents including one named OS-25, "Wang 928 Disk Operating System, LISP Reference Manual" dated November 1977 by Paul Constantine Anagnostopoulous. I remember LISP being one of the last things Paul did besides reading over my Operating System source code for a week and declaring "Phui, I don't think I want to work on this." Keeping in style, the copyright page includes a final quote "That's easy for you to say.... Anonymous".
AN INTERESTING REFERENCE
I ran across this arbitrary writeup in recent weeks I have no idea who Ephraim Vishniac is or was.One statement he made caught my eye, and made me remember that I actually did something once. It is in bold type below.
decvax!wanginst!wang!ephraim@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU
Wed, 28 Jan 87 20:25:34 est
In Risks 4.42, Alan Wexelblat asks about the applicability of the principle of "loose coupling" to computer systems. I think the principle is a valuable one. Herewith, a brief study in contrast.
My present employer, Wang Labs, makes a variety of computer systems. The Wang VS series are conventional minicomputers. That is, they have a cpu which runs user tasks, with a conventional OS. The Wang OIS is a loosely-coupled system in which a central file server (the OIS "master") supports a collection of workstations and peripheral devices. The VS, which is probably no better or worse than most computers of its class, suffers occasionally from task crashes and OS crashes. Installation of new peripherals or major new software generally requires an IPL or two. On the OIS, all user code runs in the workstation. If your workstation (or other peripheral) crashes, the most that's required is to cycle power on the device. The master sees the power-up, and reloads you. *All* OIS software except the master code can be re-installed without an IPL. Peripherals can be installed simply by plugging them in.
In a development environment, VS's are sometimes reloaded hourly in order to change software, change configuration, or recover from crashes. (Released software, of course, is orders of magnitude more stable.) OIS's? The last time mine was IPLed was to recover from a mechanical disk failure, months ago. Master crashes are practically unheard of.
Generally, I think loose coupling presents an invaluable opportunity for bullet-proofing of components. It becomes possible to validate your input and to recover from external problems, only when "input" and "external" are well-defined terms. Let the lines be drawn.
Disclaimer: These are my own opinions about Wang products. Other Wang employees, salesmen, and customers have their own opinions.
Ephraim Vishniac, decvax!wanginst!wang!ephraim