In and around Washington DC, there will soon be voice mail for the homeless, said the news dispatch. Press 1 if you have spare change. Press 2 if your windshield is dirty, press 3 if you want to buy a newspaper about life in the urban rough, press 4 if you want to hear the buskers’ latest hits. Are these people kidding? Apparently not. It’s just that some people feed the unfortunate multitudes with food this time of year, while others feed them public relations. The stated intention of the project is to help the homeless find shelter or jobs. Why this requires voice mail once a homeless person has become a client of one of the social workers that have been enlisted to administer the system isn’t particularly clear. Nor did we learn how the disenfranchised of America’s capital will partake of the exquisite pleasures of voice mail technology. Coping obviously isn’t their long suit.
Folk from cyberspace
Voice mail for the homeless is reportedly a recent development that first appeared in Providence, Rhode Island. So if you happen to suffer a personal breakdown because you kept calling IBM and only got voice mail, and when you come to your senses you find yourself all alone in a Providence alleyway, steer clear of the kinder, gentler folk from cyberspace. You will probably be subjected to another occurrence of the very trauma that broke your spirit in the first place. This warning goes double if you are calling IBM for help with the software it is says it will use to harness personal computers to its various systems. While mainframe customers have been spared for the moment, a package called Envy/400 is entering the AS/400 world even as the homeless of Washington DC get their first taste of telecommunications technology’s bitter fruit. The Envy package we have fooled around with the Smalltalk/V object-oriented software system that is its foundation – is truly impressive. But it is very difficult to understand, let alone use to write slick end-user applications. By IBM’s admission, the company’s transition to object oriented software for forthcoming versions of the AS/400 operating system (C++ in this case) has been a source of severe frustration on the part of its programmers, to say nothing of delays in a critical project. Also, Smalltalk/V for Windows runs slowly even on an 80486-based personal computer… and that’s without all the extras in the full Envy package. IBM certainly wants to solve the little problem of tying personal computers into central systems while making them very helpful to end users. Customers want IBM to do this. In fact, mainframe shops wish IBM had long since come up with a way to boost end-user productivity. Well, hope springs eternal in the human breast, and in places where grammar is taught as well as Pope, it springs eternally.
By Hesh Wiener
Everyone seems to believe that personal computers will somehow be the key to a progressive new world of information processing. And many of the great minds of computerdom have avowed that one or another type of object-oriented software, probably C++, is to be the lingua franca of this next true generation of high technology. We accept these premises on the basis of our intuition and the modicum of faith in expertise that has survived our experiences. However, software that makes systems programmers capable of great works is not for end users; it’s not even sufficiently refined to be fed to applications programmers, no matter what they’re used to being fed. If IBM really thinks its first whack at object-oriented software for the masses is ready for deployment, why hasn’t it come up with a few sample applications? What hasn’t the company put this supposedly marvellous package to work in its offices, where it says it is now burning the midnight oil to streamline internal operations? And why hasn’t IBM’s vaunted Integrated Systems Solutions Co facilities management enterprise boasted as loudly of its object-oriented programming prowess as it has its burgeoning gross revenue? Because object-oriented software is baffling, that’s why.
Anxiety attacks
Most
of IBM’s programmers are separated from object-oriented programming competency by hundreds of hours of very demanding study, plus several anxiety attacks. We’re all for the ambition that will haul IBM out of its morass. We’re all for progress and learning and better ways of using computers. Who isn’t? But we think something else is going on, and we hope and believe it is just one of those corporate accidents. It looks like IBM is hoping its customers will figure out how to use object-oriented programming and personal computers and networks… and invest the time, money and ingenuity to save IBM’s cookies. By all means get somebody in your organisation to tinker with the software. The future may well belong to those that can get OOPs to jump through hoops. And pay no mind to the debate about universal object libraries. If the software industry ever settles on a standard, IBM will probably be the last to find out, unless you are waiting for IBM’s guidance, in which case you will be the last to find out. Have you talked to any IBM executives lately? Do they seem to have a vision, which their chairman says isn’t necessary? Maybe this is a good time to press one or two for some straight answers about strategy.
Copyright (C) 1993 Technology News of America. All rights reserved.
