padpowell (11/29/82)
I think that you are simply seeing the repeat of a cycle that occurs
during a "hot" product development. My personal model of the process is:
1. Blue Sky period. Nobody knows what they want, but all sorts of neat
ideas.
2. Crufty First Spread. Some wizard with more guts than brains nails up
a first version. Does what he wants well.
3. Immediate success of the Crufty Code version.
4. Followed by rapid disillusionment of the users when they try to use it.
5. Appearance of several Hacker Upgrades that add features, specific
hardware/software/wetware modifications. These are not compatible with
Crufty, but because they answer a specific user market requirement,
become fairly successful.
6. Proposed Standard. At some totally obscure, unadvertised, and very
small meeting, a group of Hackers get together and finally outline
the standard for Crufty. Actually, there are N+1 standards, N from the
individual Hackers, and the 'union' which contains all of the bad and
all of the good ideas.
7. Portable Crufty. Will run on any of the N systems that were represented at
the Proposed Standard meeting.
8. P-Cruft: encoded in Pascal, and available from your local friendly hacker
university. Not available to people 1.) Outside continental U.S. 2.) with
even the slightest tinge of "commercial users".
9. CRUFT (copyright IBM/Bell Labs/W.E./ATT/ITT/who knows): runs on UN*X
or whatever. The less said about this phase on the net, the better.
Challenge to the net: What is the next stage? Any suitable answers,
revisions, challenges, etc. will be posted in summary in net.misc.
Patrick ("Wheel of Reincarnation") Powell
CCNG, U.Waterloo, Waterloo, Ont. Canada.