Re: i5/OS...

["James H H Lampert" <jamesl@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> IBM always did it backward.  The secret labs had cool project names like
> Pacific and Silverlake.  When marketing got hold of them, they became
> System/38 and Application Server/400.  Everybody else has
> secret project S38495-j until marketing christens it something like
> 'Oracle'.

Part of that has to do with the sort of "more-military-than-the-military"
mindset of IBM, and partly it's because IBM is one of those companies that
has no sense of humor when it comes to product naming.

Many years ago, I worked for Oxxi, a publisher of software for the
Commodore Amiga. At the time, we were publishing Marco Papa's "A-Talk"
terminal emulation and file transfer program. (This was back before
everybody and his dog had TCP stacks on their computers, back when, if
people had Internet access at all, it was almost always through "shell"
accounts, and when files were transmitted with protocols like Kermit and
XModem.

The scripting language of A-Talk eventually became rich enough that a very
crude BBS could be implemented in it. I developed such a script, which we
bundled with the product as an example of what it could do. With my usual
dry wit, I called the example script "BORED," and made the sign-on request
message "Hello, I'm Bored. Please sign on."

Marco, the author of A-Talk loved it. So did the President of Oxxi (who
was also chairman of the board, and principal stockholder). The script
example, that is. But the boss didn't like the name (Marco didn't, as I
recall, have a problem with it, though), and changed it. to "MiniBBS."

So much for humorous and creative program naming.

--
JHHL