What did the “father of HLASM” and one of the great supporters of SHARE indicate was a key ingredient of success in the mainframe ecosystem? The fun of the mainframe!
He discussed the role he played in the success of Rexx, XEDIT, and VM as follows:
“We were one of the early test sites for Rex and for XEDIT. Rex at that time was spelled with a single X. XEDIT in particular was such an advance on any of the other editors available that our users were turning up bugs at a great rate. And some IBM executive came out and said, ‘Well there are so many errors in this thing, we’ll have to kill the product.’ And the managers had to say, ‘No, no, no! They are finding bugs because we like it; it’s products that nobody likes that don’t show any bugs.’ And so, we’d like to think that we helped to keep Rexx, XEDIT, and VM going. I’m sure we did our small part.”
Read more from this series inspired by an interview with the late Dr. John Ehrman, conducted by Reg Harbeck at SHARE Atlanta in 2012