saml (01/17/83)
Date: December 14, 1982 At the monthly meeting last night of the Microprocessor Standards Committee (the MSC; better known as the "Silicon Valley Mafia") champagne abounded because P696 (the S-100 standard) and P796 (the Multibus standard) had become official, IEEE standards. (Amen.) Now, instead of saying "the proposed IEEE 796 standard" or "the IEEE 796 draft standard," you can just say "the 796 stan- dard". (Whoopie.) Herb Hecht and Roy Russo, two IEEE officers, were at hand to bring down from on high their proposals to further the success of MSC. They wanted to re-situate MSC within the Computer Society and to offer a separate publication on Standards. A motion was made and passed to keep the MSC intact and to step it one notch up in the IEEE bureaucracy as its own Technical Committee (TC) (rather than installing the bulk of MSC into an existing TC). The problem of a draft standard backlog awaiting publication for public comment and outstanding Project Authorization Requests (PARs) may get some relief if the proposal for MSC to become a TC goes through at the next meeting of the IEEE governing board. At 1:45 am this morning I duly reported that my working group, MOSI (Microprocessor Operating Systems Interface) will hold MOSI V at Univ. of Arizona, 23-25 Mar '83 to do Rev. 6. ---Sam Kirk, MOSI (P855) Secretary