------------------------------------------------------------ UniNews The Biweekly Newsletter For UniForum Members ------------------------------------------------------------ Issue Date: August 17, 1994 Volume VIII, Number 13 ------------------------------------------------------------ UniNews is written and published by UniForum's publications department. For information on articles in this issue or to contribute news to future issues, contact Don Dugdale at don@uniforum.org or (408) 986-8840, ext. 29, or (800) 255-5620 ext. 29. Copyright 1994 by UniForum. All rights reserved. UNIX is a registered trademark, licensed exclusively by X/Open Co., Ltd. UniForum is a trademark of UniForum. Printed in USA. UniNews (ISSN 1069-0395) is published biweekly for $12 per year (membership dues) by UniForum, 2901 Tasman Dr., Suite 205, Santa Clara, CA 95054. Except for individual use by member subscribers, no portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of UniForum. UniNews is presented in ASCII format. It is also available in PostScript by accessing the UniForum World Wide Web Server. Point your WWW client to http://www.uniforum.org. ------------------------------------------------------------ Table of Contents: o Object-based Software: Is It the Next Thing? o Object-Oriented Programming Explained o Calendar o AT&T's Jeanne Baccash Joins UniForum Board o Affiliate News o UniNews Recruitment and Positions Wanted o For Cold Summer Nights... o UniForum Member Benefits ------------------------------------------------------------ Object-based Software: Is It the Next Thing? --------------------------------------------- According to Steve Jobs, it's knocking at the mainstream computing door Is object-oriented computing the shape of things to come in the computing industry? Yes, if you believe the Sun Microsystems and Next Computer representatives who presented an internationally-broadcast panel discussion on the future of objects at last month's Object World conference in San Francisco. And yes again, if you believe John R. Rymer, vice president of the Patricia Seybold Group, Boston, MA, analysts specializing in distributed computing. Rymer, also speaking at Object World, assessed current events in distributed object computing, noting that the leading object-based environments are coming from companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Sun, Next, and Microsoft, all of whom are funding major efforts. "All the major players see distributed object computing as the next stage of the development of the computing industry," Rymer said. And that spells good news for open systems. "Openness can be achieved very effectively through the use of object technology-more effectively than by trying to legislate through development of standards," he said. "Essentially, what object orientation is all about is modularity and openness." Steve Jobs, the Apple co-founder whose Next Computer is a partner with Sun in the OpenStep object-oriented software development initiative, was even more positive. "This is a software revolution of the first order that dwarfs graphical user interfaces," Jobs said in Sun's closed-circuit telecast. "The only way we can write the software that needs to be written in the next few years is through objects. Once you understand what's happening with objects, I think you'll agree that all software will be written this way some day." Beginning with a germ in 1975, objects have advanced to the door of mainstream computing, according to Jobs. "Objects are not yet in the house, but they're knocking on the door. By 1995 they will have one foot in the mainstream house and by 1996 they will have both feet in the mainstream house," he predicted. Object-oriented programming is an attempt to modularize programming through the use of programming entities called objects, which are collections of instructions and data. Programs are written by creating classes of objects with common characteristics such as methods, then using instances of those classes to perform the work. A simplified structure and reuse of software are major goals. A major advantage of objects is their inherent flexibility, allowing software developers to innovate without breaking what has gone before, said Bud Tribble, vice president of object products at SunSoft. It's a quality that would allow computing products to incorporate change rather than stagnating, Tribble said. The Object Management Group, a consortium with support from most major vendors, is attempting to give objects common interfaces and make them reusable and interoperable among the products of multiple vendors. OMG's Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), whose release 1.1 has been available for more than a year, is a step in that direction, Rymer said, but he noted that interoperability is still a problem with CORBA. Release 2.0 of CORBA, which is not yet available, will allow an object managed by one vendor's object request broker (ORB) to invoke a method on a remote object managed by another vendor's ORB via a standard mechanism. "The main issue is interoperability," said OMB President Chris Stone. "It's the ability to be able to write an application and have some soft of guarantee that it will work across platforms." Jobs added, "The key [to the object market] is offering customers something that's so important that they have got to have it. And they can't get it from Microsoft for five years." In the race to establish an object-oriented computing environment, the contenders are Microsoft, the OpenStep environment of Sun and Next launched eight months ago, and Taligent, the combined effort of Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Apple, Jobs said. "Objects are coming down to a three-horse race," he said, claiming that OpenStep is leading because it will ship an estimated 100,000 copies in 1994. Neither Microsoft's Cairo nor Taligent products are yet available. Rymer called Microsoft's OLE, which is available, that company's "first step on the road to a distributed object environment." OLE is essentially a set of services that provides for interaction between compound documents, such as word processing and spreadsheets, he said. OLE addresses only compound documents on a single user's desktop. "My experiences with OLE have not been that great," Rymer said. "Microsoft does not support CORBA. And it's my opinion that they won't anytime soon. That does not help their competitive position." But he added, "Microsoft's approach is always to get the product out there. It never works well at first, but they always make it right." Customers for Objects The most important market for object-oriented products is the corporate market, Jobs said. Early users are Barclays Bank, Swiss Bank and the London Stock Exchange. He predicted that service providers in government are going to be large users of objects, even though it's the corporate market that's driving objects. Sun co-founder Bill Joy, now the company's vice president of research, illustrated the way object orientation simplifies life for programmers by comparing documentation for desktop operating systems. All the books necessary to write applications for UNIX, DOS/Windows and the Apple Macintosh weigh a total of 200 pounds, compared to nine pounds for the object-oriented Next environment, Joy said. "Objects are a lot like people," Jobs noted, "in that their complexity is shielded from the observer. You can interact with them without knowing precisely how they get everything done," he said. Another approach to component software is provided by OpenDoc from Component Integration Laboratories, a consortium of Apple, IBM, Novell, WordPerfect, and others. Its aim is to enable users to create compound documents easily and intuitively, cutting across platforms and including information and media from many different applications. OpenDoc will also allow developers to partition existing applications into independent components that can be combined in various ways. Rymer said OpenDoc is supported by an ORB architecture. The first software developer's kits for OpenDoc began shipping recently . End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ Object-Oriented Programming Explained -------------------------------------- Consultant tells what to expect in converting An audience at the Software Entrepreneurs' Forum/UniForum Open Systems Special Interest Group last week heard why and how object-oriented programming is being hailed as the next big advance in computing. (Also see the adjoining article on object environments.) Bill Fairfield, a consultant with his own company, Fairfield & Co., in Oakley, CA, and an instructor at the University of California's Santa Cruz and Berkeley campuses, told the Palo Alto, CA, group first what's wrong with today's software. It's generally late being delivered, costs too much, and doesn't work very well, he said. In addition, "What's generally not recognized outside the software community is that software development is an extremely high-stress environment," and that contributes to the other problems, he said. Fairfield's main emphasis for why software doesn't work was that the method for writing software has been forced on developers by the programming languages they use. In addition, he said the problems computing tries to solve are complex, poorly understood and poorly articulated; and neither managers nor computing customers can accurately gauge the scope of a project. Object programming can help, he said. The first computer languages were assembly languages, which used mainly symbols. "These were good for basically nothing," Fairfield said. Then higher-level languages were developed that used English words and instructions executed in relation to modules of code. "We have stretched this as far as it will go," Fairfield said. "The problem is that this isn't the way people think. People think in terms of objects." The current problems being tackled by computers "are too complicated to be done in this rudimentary fashion." To explain what he termed the "software crisis," Fairfield told of a study done by the military on the cost to fix a problem in a development program. To fix a problem in the design and test phase costs 10 times as much as in the requirements analysis phase. It costs 100 times as much in the production phase and 1,000 times as much once the completed system is in the field. Object orientation works well for software for the same reason that it works for other engineering disciplines, he noted. In order to be solved, problems have to be decomposed-broken into component parts-and put back together. While most of today's programming deals with problems using functions, "Other engineering disciplines decompose problems by objects, not by functions. Objects will interact with one another to meet system requirements." An Illustration To illustrate how objects are used in programming, Fairfield used the example of a bank's automatic teller machine (ATM). The objects in programming an ATM could include the ATM itself, the user interface, the printer, the envelope slot, and the cash drawer. Each of these is considered a class of object. Both data and operations on the data are bundled into each object as a single entity. "This simple change of bundling together the data and the operations into a single package solves some of the major problems of functional decomposition," Fairfield said. First, unanticipated changes can be made in data values, data storage types, and other variables by making them in one place. Thus, the programmer has simultaneous access to all data members. In addition, "You can make changes to the way data is stored without affecting the program." Basic to object orientation is the notion of encapsulation-hiding data inside an object. "Encapsulation produces two views of each object-an outside view that shows what the object does and an inside view that shows how it works. Only the developers of an object need to see the inside view," Fairfield said. To interact with the object, all the program-or another programmer employing the object-needs to have is the outside view. "It involves trust, which is completely alien to software engineering," Fairfield observed. When told to employ objects, traditional programmers always want to see the code first, he said. For that reason, not all traditional programmers may be able to transition to object orientation. "The goal of object technology is to get the developers to deal with the interface and not the object itself," Fairfield said. That reduces complexity. "As an object-oriented programmer, I no longer need to know how the object itself works. I only need to know how to make it do what I want." A programmer specifies objects at the level of the class, and all objects are grouped into classes. All the operations that can be performed on a class must be specified in the class itself, whether or not all the operations are actually employed on each instance of the class. In that way, "If you know how to work with one interface [in a class of objects], you know how to work with them all," Fairfield claimed. In using the ATM example, each possible operation using the ATM must be programmed into the ATM class. Therefore, the operation "reject the card" must be included, even though a specific object may not employ it. Values are added when objects are created. For example, "car" could be a class, with color, model, and price as values that are added when each object in that class is created. Hierarchies and Inheritance Also fundamental to object orientation is the notion of inheritance of properties. The classes are ordered into hierarchies, with some classes having the status of superclass. Properties are then handed down from the superclasses to the classes beneath, so that if a superclass contains operations X and Y, all its classes have those operations. Thus, when changes are made to the program, the change can be made in only one class-only one place in the program-and the entire program will be fixed. That also reduces complexity, saves time, and prevents the kind of code proliferation that creates maintenance nightmares. In traditional programming, "Code grows because for every change, the programmer has to go back to where he was before the change was introduced" and recreate a sequence of instructions, Fairfield said. That can produce more errors. Another advantage of object orientation is that it creates a model of how the real world operates, and that model can then be used to solve other problems in its domain. As an example, Fairfield cited the way people solve the problem of finding their way in a strange city. The way traditional programming solves the problem is to give step-by-step directions leading from one starting point-a hotel, for instance-to a destination. That works as long as you always start and finish in the same place. And it doesn't allow for unforeseen problems such as road repairs. In Fairfield's view, object orientation is more like a road map. It creates a model containing objects such as streets and buildings and shows how they connect. The model can be easily reviewed for accuracy. It can be easily changed as conditions change. And it can be used in a variety of circumstances to solve a variety of problems. The Object-orientation Process The object-orientation process consists of four steps: scope the problem, considering all the external entities with which the system or domain interacts; identify the top-level objects; schedule the project; and iterate yourself through the programming cycle. In identifying the top-level objects, it's best to write a summary of what the system is and what it does, then take the summary to the managers of the system for feedback. Ideally, five to nine objects should be selected as the highest-level objects in the system. Then, through considering a standard set of use cases, an event schema can be created for each possible use of the system. An event schema is good for only one use case. Scheduling the project will involve incremental deliveries, Fairfield said, and each delivery must have software that fully meets some of the use cases. To achieve that, the use cases are bundled into releases and scheduled for a particular release. "What needs to be done in this phase is to take the objects and schedule them against the use cases they must satisfy. And it's good to get the user interface class in early because everyone will have an opinion." Then any suggested changes can be made early in the project. Again in the ATM example, release 1 could contain only the ATM class. Release 2 could contain the ATM, the user interface, the printer and the reader. Release three could contain those classes plus the envelope slot and the cash drawer. "This type of schedule gives the manager time to give you his input on how the software is working under current conditions", Fairfield said. "About the worst feeling in the world is to get to the end of a project and deliver obsolete software." Adopting Object Orientation In adopting object orientation, cost savings can't be achieved overnight, Fairfield warned, which makes it sometimes a hard sell to software developers. "Object-oriented programming has been sold as motherhood, apple pie, and all your software problems will be over," he said. "Developers don't believe it, and they shouldn't believe it." He recommended setting up and running several pilot programs and prototype projects to test the method, then writing a transition plan. Developers should also remember that many objects have already been created and are available for free, Fairfield noted. The project team will need to test them and organize them into a hierarchy. Object programming will probably cost more than traditional programming on the first two projects that a programming team tries, Fairfield said. In his experience, the best that can be expected on the first project is 28 percent above the usual cost. "Your second one is at best break even. But from the third on out, you're going to be making money on reuse of software." On a particular military contract, one bidder-Magnavox-was able to reuse 386,000 lines of code of 1.8 million lines from another project. For that reason, other bidders were priced out. End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ Calendar --------- *** Digital Media Outlook Sept. 12-13, San Francisco Airport Marriott, San Francisco, CA; by Technologic Partners; (212) 696-9330. *** NetWorld+Interop '94 Atlanta Sept. 12-16, Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta, GA; by ZD Expos; (800) 488-2883 or (415) 525-0199. *** Interex '94 Conference & Expo Sept. 18-22, Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO; by Interex; (800) 468-3739 or (408) 747-0227. *** 8th Annual USENIX Systems Administration Conference (LISA VIII), Sept. 19-23, Town & Country Hotel, San Diego, CA; by USENIX, SAGE; (714) 588-8649 or e-mail conference@usenix.org. *** Networks Expo '94 Dallas Sept. 20-22, Dallas Convention Center, Dallas, TX; by Bruno Blenheim; (800) 829-3976 or (201) 346-1400. *** Information Superhighway Summit Sept. 26-28, Red Lion Hotel, San Jose, CA; by ComNet; (508) 820-8628. *** UNIX Expo Oct. 4-6, Javits Convention Center, New York, NY; by Bruno Blenheim; (800) 829-3976 or (201) 346-1400 End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ AT&T's Jeanne Baccash Joins UniForum Board ------------------------------------------- New director spent years developing UNIX, leading unification Biograph of: Jeanne Baccash Age: 44 Birthplace: Brooklyn, N.Y. Car She Drives: Leases a 1994 Cadillac Seville for her 60-mile (one-way) commute. Position: Assistant Vice President, Network and Systems Management Business Unit, AT&T Global Information Solutions (formerly NCR) Open Systems Leadership: Just elected to the board of directors, UniForum Association Time in Current Position: 4 months Years in the Industry: 21 Pet Open Systems Peeve: "How frequently the term open systems is misused, misinterpreted and misrepresented. There are lots of people-companies-who say they are committed to open systems when the reality is something different. That's where we do the customers the greatest disservice. When you hear companies that you know are closed and proprietary saying they're committed to open systems, what does that mean to a bank or a retail company? I think we're not always honest about the term and what it means." For some in the computing industry, open systems has been a concept to adapt to. For Jeanne Baccash, it's been nothing short of a career. Baccash, who has been leading UNIX system development and unification efforts for years, was chosen by UniForum members in June to begin a two-year term on the association's board of directors. Previously, she was active in UniForum affairs as chair of the technical steering committee. Math Major Baccash has spent her entire career with AT&T, the company that gave birth to UNIX, and the company it spawned and spun off, the former UNIX System Laboratories (USL). After Novell bought USL in 1993, Baccash was a Novell employee for a few months until she moved back to AT&T last January, this time with its Global Information Solutions division, formerly NCR. She began her career with AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1973 after completing her bachelor's and master's degrees in math at St. John's University in New York City. Although she was interested in computers in college, there was no computer science curriculum at St. John's. "I thought about teaching and I still think about teaching because I do enjoy that," Baccash says. She took two or three computer courses in college and added to that by taking several courses from Stevens Institute in New Jersey while at AT&T. Later she taught an introductory computer science course at a community college. "The interesting thing is that the math background has helped me," Baccash notes. "One of the things you learn when you are a math major is how to take abstract concepts and break them down into workable parts that you can address, attack, and deal with. That's something that has helped me in the jobs I've had. I may talk with a customer who says he needs a system that is easier to manage. What does that really mean? People who are good in math tend to be good at understanding that something that broad can mean many different things. I try to break it into parts and figure out how to address what they really mean." For her first 10 years with AT&T, Baccash worked in one area-helping automate the regional Bell operating companies, including their inventory, circuits, and business ordering systems. Her first project was called the Trunks Integrated Record Keeping System (TIRKS). With TIRKS she was working in assembly language systems, doing development on IBM System 370 machines. She did customer support, including fixing bugs and handling maintenance, then moved into special services forecasting using Cobol. UNIX was employed for source code control. In her second project, Baccash helped automate the process of dividing up revenue among the various Bell operating companies from calls between company areas, based on the ownership of the circuitry and cables, as well as federal and state regulations. "That was an extensive effort for a couple of years," Baccash recalls. "We did PL/1 development using the IMS [database management system] on IBM systems. I was also involved in doing customer support, testing, and training. Then I moved into systems engineering, working with the customer to define the requirement." For her last telephone system job, Baccash worked in systems engineering on a project to mechanize and automate the regional phone companies' business offices. At that time, when customers called to order service, a phone company representative had to manually flip through a number of books to figure out what services and products could be offered. Each regional company had different offerings and procedures. "We built an IMS PL/1 prototype and simulated a telephone office. We brought in service representatives from New York Telephone and did three weeks of intensive testing, basically letting them play with the prototype system. We videotaped the service and improved the prototype product based on live observation of the customer service representatives." UNIX Development In 1983, Baccash moved into the UNIX System Organization of Bell Laboratories, later USL, where she worked on UNIX development for the next 11 years. At the time, UNIX System V was going into its first commercial release. Until then, UNIX had been a research project that was made available to universities but was not sold or licensed by AT&T. Baccash, a manager by then, worked on developing the kernel operating system. Eventually, she created a UNIX systems engineering organization to work with customers to plan features that would meet their needs in the operating system. First, the organization worked with a core set of AT&T's UNIX customers. Then she was instrumental in forming UNIX International, a multivendor consortium that worked to understand customer needs in more formal processes. Baccash's group was responsible for writing the specifications for the major releases of UNIX System V, from release 2 through release 4.2 and UNIXWare, a product of USL and Novell. "For a number of years, I managed some groups creating specific features-things like security," Baccash says. "I was very heavily involved in the work we did for the National Computer Security Center in putting security into the UNIX release that went out in 1993." By 1989 she had taken over all systems engineering for UNIX, defining all new features, including networking, kernel features, and the command-level user interface. During that period, Baccash's involvement with consortia such as UNIX International began to lead her toward open systems unification efforts. Her groups had responsibility for working with POSIX, X/Open, and in other standards development efforts. She was USL's representative to the UNIX International Steering Committee. In 1992 she was named to manage strategic planning for all USL products, including network and system management, and the Tuxedo transaction processing monitor. UNIX Unification In 1993, the year that Novell bought USL, Baccash spent a large part of her time in UNIX unification efforts. She led Novell's contribution to the multivendor group that defined the Spec 1170 agreement on common application programming interfaces (APIs). Hewlett-Packard, Novell, IBM, Sun, and the Open Software Foundation (OSF) were also a part of that effort. She also led Novell's transfer of the UNIX trademark to X/Open and was the company's representative to the OSF reorganization committee, helping draft OSF's new charter, its closer relationship with X/Open, and the new Pre-structured Technology process. The Spec 1170 agreement came about because of increasing frustration among users and independent software vendors (ISVs) over the many varieties of UNIX, no one of which dominated the others. Applications had to be written in several versions and rewritten for each new release of AIX, HP-UX, SVR4, Solaris and any other vendor's UNIX that the application targeted. "There was a general belief that the POSIX standard was not enough," Baccash says. "It was good but it was too minimal and application developers use more than the POSIX standard. So I believe there had been some work started by HP and IBM, looking at some areas of commonality. They invited Sun and Novell to participate. Because everybody had differing views, we tried to define what our common objectives were. We wanted a minimal definition that everybody could meet-a definition for a common set of operating system interfaces. We wanted a set that was minimal but sufficient to meet the needs of application developers." Beginning in the spring of 1993, the group put its criteria together. The set of common APIs had to be POSIX-compliant. It had to conform to the X/Open Portability Guide (XPG3 and XPG4) as well as certain de facto standards-the System V Interface Definition (SVID), level 1, and OSF's Application Environment Specification (AES). "We said that to include what application developers were writing to, we need to include those things. That's the kind of minimal set that meets our commitment to our customers." Then another group of interfaces was added, selected from the top 75 to 100 UNIX applications. "They ran the gamut from data management, word processing, to every conceivable kind of application that was out there. We ran a tool to see what interfaces they were using." The additional interfaces needed to support those applications brought the total number to 1,170 interfaces, a number that gave Spec 1170 its name. "I don't want to make it seem like a simple task," Baccash says. "There were incompatibilities. It was an intense several-month effort with a lot of very, very long days. We were locked away for weeks on end, working through the technical issues. We used UI and OSF to send the document out to all their members. Then we identified ISVs, OEMs and end users, and got their comments. We spent weeks reviewing the comments and incorporating the comments into the spec." Although she sees Spec 1170 as a huge step, Baccash says it won't be the last. "This was an operating system specification allowing vendors to say that it doesn't make sense to compete at this [operating system] level anymore, but to agree on a common set of interfaces. Over time, the bar will be raised. Things will continue to be added to it. Five years ago, we couldn't have agreed on this, and I think that in the next five years we will see a need for agreement on things like networking, perhaps database management and certainly end-user interfaces. The bar will continue to be raised, driven by the application developers and the end users, who should be driving it. And if they see a need for commonality, then the vendors have a responsibility to work together to provide that and stop competing with each other in those spaces. I think system management is another area where more needs to be looked at, and I think that will happen." The transfer of the UNIX brand to X/Open also was a major step, Baccash points out. "It was important for the unification of the industry to give over that trademark to a neutral body, so that it wasn't driven or controlled by Novell or any of the other major companies," she says. "There was a belief on the part of Novell and the other companies that UNIX was the name you wanted to call it. UNIX was what the industry knew as that open operating system. They wanted to have X/Open be the administrator and grant the trademark to companies that are Spec 1170 compliant. We also wanted to make sure that the trademark meant something, that it was protected." Back to AT&T Last January, Baccash left Novell and took a new job with AT&T Global Information Solutions (formerly NCR). There, she did strategic planning for the network products division. Last April she was promoted to assistant vice president of the network and systems management business unit. Now she has responsibility for strategic and product planning, architecture, development and product management, and deployment for the company's network and systems management products. "One of the things that I've been involved in is our new One Vision network and system management strategy, which was announced at the end of June," she says. "All of the AT&T entities are coming together and agreeing on a common network management platform, namely HP OpenView, with some technology coming in over time from NetLabs and from AT&T." As a UniForum director, she's concerned that UniForum focus on its role as an information resource to members, "to help make some sanity out of this confusion about open systems, what it is, and what it means in various dimensions. It is a very confusing mess that we have presented to the end users, our customers out there. UniForum can provide an impartial kind of neutral view of products, technologies, directions, standards-that whole gamut." End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ Affiliate News --------------- *** Hungarian Affiliate Joins UniForum *** First former Iron Curtain country forms affiliate group UniForum Hungary, he first affiliate group from the former Soviet Bloc, has joined UniForum. The group is a newly formed amalgamation of three organizations, says Otto Hutter, the group's affiliate liaison officer. One, the 50-member Hungary UNIX User Group (HUUG), is an affiliate of EurOpen, the European open systems group that supports various national groups. HUUG formerly supported EurOpen's Internet operation, EuNet, which allowed members to use the EuNet and connected them to the Internet. Because of a recent realignment, EuNet has been separated from EurOpen, and as a result, HUUG is less active than it used to be, Hutter says. Other Hungarian Internet providers have taken up the slack. The second organization making up the affiliate is Hungarnet, with about 300 institutional members, including universities, high schools, libraries, and others. Hungarnet "is very important in Hungary because it operates a Hungarian X.25 electronic mail system, called Ella," Hutter says. "This is a centralized mail system with a host that you can reach by X.25 [standard protocol] from a simple PC. This was the first country-wide electronic network in Hungary." Another activity of Hungarnet is the operation of a Hungarian Internet backbone connecting the largest cities in the country. Open Show is the third organization that is now connected to the new UniForum Hungary. Open Show is a small trade show and conference that is held in Budapest twice a year. The conference attendance is usually about 150. Exhibitors demonstrate interoperability by connecting their machines to various networks. This show will be sponsored by UniForum Hungary for the first time this year, during the second half of November. Another planned activity of UniForum Hungary will be monthly meetings, organized jointly with HUUG. Hutter says the affiliate also would like to set up a network server for UniForum members, operated jointly with Hungarnet. "We will unify the three groups in UniForum Hungary, and their activities will be coordinated," Hutter says. UniForum Hungary, just getting started, has not held a formal election of officers. Hutter, an educational services editor for the Computer and Automation Institute in Budapest, spends his time organizing UNIX and open systems courses for the public and private companies. He is also editor of the Hungarian UNIX Newsletter and gives presentations to user group meetings. Hutter is cautiously optimistic about the future of his fledgling organization. "In November I hope we have a quite successful exhibition," he says. "I can say more after that." *** UniGroup of New York Continues 11-year Meeting String A meeting open to all attendees of UNIX Expo will be held by UniGroup of New York, the UniForum affiliate, on Oct. 5 at Javits Convention Center in New York. The meeting will begin immediately following the close of the exhibit floor, about 5:30 p.m., in one of the conference rooms in the convention center basement. The meeting is one in a series held every other month for 11 years by UniGroup of New York. A group of a dozen UNIX users incorporated under that name in 1983. "We had been meeting informally since 1980," says Peter Gutmann, one of the founders, a former executive director and now associate executive director. "We started out as being a bunch of Onyx users. Onyx computers are long dead and gone, but they were one of the UNIX boxes. It was a machine with a 36MB disk and it ran [UNIX] System III. We've been meeting pretty much every other month since then. "It was a technical group and we would get together to discuss the various things that were going on and the problems we were having. If you think support is bad now, it was worse then. There were fewer people who actually knew anything. Any clues were appreciated. There was a lot of self-help. UNIX existed in maybe 200 places in the world then, in 1980 and 1981. It's only been around 25 years and it was a real sleeper for the first 15. "People like Onyx had gone to AT&T and paid them for a source license with binary distribution rights, and that was how it was done. The manuals were reprints of the AT&T manuals. The Onyx was modeled on a classic minicomputer. A modern equivalent would be a DEC VAX or something like that." UniGroup of New York pre-dates today's UNIX Expo trade show and was consulted by the organizers before the first show was presented. UniGroup now has 140 members and meets the third Thursday of every other month. Meetings have been spread around Manhattan over the years and now ordinarily take place at the headquarters of Chemical Bank at 55 Water St. Guest speakers are invited to each meeting, but "We don't want anybody selling us anything, be it hardware or software," says J.P. Radley, group treasurer. "If we find an expert who works for a vendor, we ask then to give a non-vendor-specific kind of talk. People don't come here to be sold. And we don't sell our mailing list to personnel people." End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ UniNews Recruitment and Positions Wanted ----------------------------------------- For inclusion in the UniNews Classified Section, please provide the following information, being as specific as possible. If you do not want your name printed, please indicate in item No. 1 and UniNews will receive replies and forward them to you. Please type or write legibly. Your classified may be edited for length or clarity. UniNews "Positions Wanted" classifieds are available FREE OF CHARGE to UniForum members only. Upon receipt of your material, we will publish your classified in the next TWO available issues of the biweekly UniNews. YOU MUST BE A MEMBER OF UNIFORUM TO PARTICIPATE 1. Your name: ________________________________________ Shall we print your name in UniNews? Y or N Your UniForum Membership # (if available): ________________________________________ 2. Where Hiring Companies May Reach You (include phone, fax and e-mail)? ________________________________________ 3. Title and Description of the Job You Want: ________________________________________ 4. Geographical Preference: ________________________________________ 5. Professional Experience and Qualifications: ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ 6. Highest Grade or Degree Achieved, and Where: ________________________________________ ________________________________________ 7. Salary Range $: ________________________________________ 8. Availability ________________________________________ You may mail or fax this form to: Sandy Parker, UniForum 2901 Tasman Drive, Suite 205 Santa Clara, CA 94054 FAX: (408) 986-1645. GOOD LUCK! POSITIONS WANTED *** Software Operations Seeks position in software operations. Experience: order management, software production, shipping/receiving, pacing release cycle, customer support; 7 years experience in operations; well versed in UNIX; developed department from scratch. Personal: B.A. in mathematics, M.B.A. Long Beach State University; salary open; available now. Chuck Niedle, phone (408) 446-9469. *** Product Manager Seeks position as product manager for a fast-growing software company. Experience: 16+ years of multilevel experience and a strong record of achievement in hardware and software products. Resourceful team player with a wide range of well-developed marketing and business administration skills. Excellent interpersonal, public speaking and writing skills. Personal: M.B.A., St. Mary's College, Moraga, CA; M.S., University of Connecticut; salary range $70K to $80K; prefer San Francisco Bay Area; available now. Box Q-UniNews, UniForum Association, 2901 Tasman Dr. #205, Santa Clara, CA 95054; fax (408) 986-1645. *** MIS Development Seeks position in MIS development using high/low level languages. Experience: 8 years developing general management systems, using network protocols, 4GLs, high/low level languages, SCO UNIX, large TCP/IP and NFS, sockets, NetWare and Windows for Workgroups. Personal: Salary range $30K; no geographical preference; available now. Claudio Lacerda, phone +55 31 441-8000 or fax +55 31 443-1000 (Brazil). *** Sales Account Rep Seeks position as sales account representative. Experience: 15 years of sales experience in multi-user business applications. Personal: B.A. with political science major, psychology minor; prefer northwestern states; salary $80K to $100K; available in 30 days. John Flaxman, (510) 484-5383. *** Sales/Sales Management Seeks position in sales or sales management. Experience: 20 years in sales and marketing of software and hardware. Personal: B.S., mathematics; M.S. computer science, MIT; prefer northwest or southwest; salary $80K to $100K; available in two weeks. Box O-UniNews, UniForum Association, 2901 Tasman Dr. #205, Santa Clara, CA 95054; fax (408) 986-1645. *** Analyst/Technical Consultant Seeks position as analyst or technical consultant. Experience: 9+ years in multiplatform environments, UNIX, VAX/VMS, DOS, NetWare, Windows 3.1; Windows 3.1; C/C++, Fortran, Pascal, Visual Basic, Paradox PAL, BASIC, assembly languages, relay ladder logic; 2 years system analysis design, configuration, exposure to Servio ODBMS and SmallTalk. Personal: B.S., physics, Clarkson University, Potsdam, N.Y.; prefer Cedar Rapids, IA, or Kansas City; salary open; available immediately. Derick Deleo, (319) 363-1167 or CompuServe 71003,2355. *** Systems Operations, Communications Seeks position in systems operations and communications. Experience: 13 years in UNIX operations and communications. Personal: A.A., computer science, Abraham Baldwin College, Tifton, GA; prefer western North Carolina; salary $30K to $35K; available January 1995. Box P-UniNews, UniForum Association, 2901 Tasman Dr. #205, Santa Clara, CA 95054; fax (408) 986-1645. End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ For Cold Summer Nights... ------------------------- Get a UniForum Sweatshirt for $20 Phone (800) 255-5620 or (408) 986-8840 for more information End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ UniForum Member Benefits ------------------------ Publications, Conferences, Discounts and More Benefits for General Members ($100 per year until Sept. 1; $125 per year after Sept. 1): Price goes up to $125 Soon. Act now! o UniForum Monthly magazine and UniNews biweekly newsletter; Free ads in the "Positions Wanted" section of UniNews; Open Systems Products Directory; All UniForum Technical Guides; Discounts on purchases of additional UniForum publications; Discounts on all UniForum conference registrations; Educational seminars and special classes; Opportunity to participate in local Affiliate activities. o Discounts on Avis car rentals. o Discounts on corporate sponsors' hardware and software: o Specialix Inc. sales, (800) 423-5364, (408) 378-7919 or fax: (408) 378-0786. e-mail: info@specialix.com o Mortice Kern Systems (MKS), 35 King St. North, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2J 2W9. Phone: (519) 884-2251 or (800) 265-2797; fax (519) 884-8861 or e-mail inquiry@mks.com. o Discounts on products, training and publications from the following companies: o Locus Computing Corp., 9800 La Cienega Blvd., Inglewood, CA 90301-4400. Or call (310) 670-6500. o InterCon Systems, (800) NET2YOU or (800) INTERCON. o Gemini Learning Systems, (403) 263-UNIX or fax (403) 261-4688. o ACI Technology Training, 500 Park Blvd., Suite 1111, Itasca, IL 60143; phone (708) 285-7800 or fax (708) 285-7440. o Open Systems Training, 4400 Computer Drive, Westboro, MA 01580; phone (800) 633-UNIX or fax (508) 898-2382. o Open Systems Alternatives (Steve Kastner), 250 Production Plaza, Cincinnati, OH 45219; (513) 733-4798; fax (513) 733-5194. o ITDC, 4000 Executive Park Drive #310, Cincinnati, OH 45241; (513) 733-4747; fax (513) 733-5194. o Nina Lytton's Open Systems Advisor, (617) 859-0859 or write OSA at 268 Newbury St., Boston, MA 02116. o Patricia Seybold Group's Monthly Reports, Don Baillargeon, (617) 742-5200 ext. 17; 148 State St., Boston, MA 02109. o .sh consulting, call (408) 241-8319 or write to 3355 Brookdale Dr., Santa Clara, CA 95051. o Faulkner Information Systems, 114 Cooper Center, 7905 Browning Road, Pennsauken, NJ 08109-4319. o QED Information Sciences Inc., 170 Linden St., P.O. Box 82-181, Wellesley, MA 02181; (800) 343-4848. o Specialized Systems Consultants Inc., P.O. Box 55549, Seattle, WA 98155-0649; (206) 527-3385; fax: (206) 527-2806. o Client/Server Tool Watch: Enabling Open Applications Development from Hurwitz Consulting Group (Dena Brody), P.O. Box 218, Newton, MA 02159; (617) 965-7691; fax (617) 969-7901. o Client/Server News from G2 Computer Intelligence, P.O. Box 7, Glen Head, NY 11545; (516) 759-7025; fax: (516) 759-7028. o Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. (Dan O'Gara), One Jacob Way, Reading, MA 01867 (800) 238-9682; fax (617) 944-7273. End Article ------------------------------------------------------------ End UniNews.