Good night Mr. Wilson, wherever you are…

A few weeks ago Alcatel announced it was acquiring Lucent. Aside from providing a brief lift to the market indices, it was another in a string of telecommunications consolidations. Another day, another merger. In the U.S., AT&T (”The Phone Company”) has nearly been reassembled from its 1984 divestiture. Well, sort of — the new AT&T may be reassembled but for better or worse it’s a different whole from its pre-1984 status.Less noted in the Alcatel acquisition of Lucent was that Alcatel is now the parent of Bell Laboratories and Western Electric, the intellectual source and supplier of a host of scientific and engineering innovations going back to the late 1800’s. In software specifically, it is daunting to try to describe the impact those organizations have had on many of us, primarily through the decision in the 1970’s to license the UNIX operating system.

If you’re using a computer of almost any kind, whatever name is attached to its operating system, it owes a portion of its heritage and implementation to UNIX and related works.

Back then, our gateway to a UNIX license involved a transaction with Western Electric and a letter from one Otis Wilson conveying the license.

Everyone in the early UNIX community had such a letter, it was as though we were connected by our common relationship to the ubiquitous but unseen Mr. Wilson. Somewhere in some box I have such a letter addressed to me, not seen for decades but retained out of some sense that it was momentous, or at least, a novelty.

Now, seeing Bell Labs and Western Electric take another step in their organizational lives is a reminder both to say “thanks again” and also of the pace and constancy of change. Novel ideas in the 1970’s for how to operate a single computer are today objects of more modest consideration, commoditized by ubiquity and market forces, and yielding to an expanded view of “a system” characterized by the dispersed, often component-based, programs that transcend a single computer or even a network of them.

This space has been created for us to have conversations about networks as systems. Mostly that, anyway. It’s a rich subject, and indeed there has been for at least the last decade intense activity from many quarters emphasizing how to program such a system. At Cassatt, we’re concerned with a more neglected aspect of such systems, the “other half” of an operating environment that does resource allocation and management of the qualities with which a service is delivered. Obviously “how it’s programmed” and “how it runs” are related topics, but we think the world has a more than adequate supply of programming frameworks and a less than adequate supply of addressing the increasing sprawl and disorder infesting IT that derives from their use.

I hope you’ll join us in this from time-to-time, and find the matters discussed interesting and at least sometimes entertaining. Welcome, and until next time (with apologies to Jimmy Durante), “good night Mr. Wilson, wherever you are.”