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From: Miles O'Neal <meo_at_netads.com>
Date: Sat Jan 9 13:38:19 1999

Bill Pechter said...
|
|Was that a case of programmer cute or did some mamanger spec the running
|man icon or was it an internationalization... Instead of running
|we'll use a world wide recognizable symbol?

I had the distinct impression that it was something
somebody just did, and someone liked it, and it took
off. Management may have wanted something, and this
fit the bill, or a crucial series of someones may
have just gone, "Oh. Cool. OK." (I think that is
what happened.)

Believe it or not, in the early 90s, that wasn't too
unusual at IBM, at least in Austin. Among other
things, that's where AIX on CD instead of tape came
from, where support for xdm and the font server and
in fact almost all the standard X apps came from.
CMVC grew out of an in-house project. It was a
pretty awesome time to be at IBM. Most of the folks
had even started treating contractors like people.

[I was a contractor. xdm and the font server were
unsupported, but the guy responsible for them worked
on them like they were. I convinced my manager that
they were important, we added serious testing to the
Product Verification Test suite, and next thing we
knew, IBM realized they weren't an albatross, but a
feature!]

The original running man was *extremely* slow, and
ate up a lot of the CPU. He also fell down a lot.
And was often wrong about whether he should be falling
down or showing off his muscles. Of course, this was
well before it was even Alpha code...

(Hey, this was 1992! Can we talk about this here???)

-Miles
Received on Sat Jan 09 1999 - 13:38:19 GMT