Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Will Dr. OpenACS survive? Or why I stopped worrying and learned to love the .LRN consortium?

Well, hey, fame's great, fleeting or otherwise. I well remember the standing I had after co-authoring the first commercial Pascal compiler, which just happened to generate code efficient enough to make it usable for the creation of system software for the PDP-11. Our company was well-known, too. We did a little public back-patting, as well.

Yet, today, hardly anyone's even heard of my old company. In 10 years, hardly anyone will be aware of Ars Digita (and if they are it will probably be because the OpenACS project continues to live).

Maybe Ruby on Rails will stick. Best of luck to them. But the fact that they happen to be the fad du jour is in no way a predictor of the odds of their project or company having any stamina, of being more than a flash in the pan.

Remember when Java was going to kill OpenACS, like three years ago?

Caroline Meeks made a good point today - she loses bids to LAMP far more often than anything else ...

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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Don's PDP-11 Pascal compiler Well Don, Google does know, (perhaps surprising given the date), if only just barely:
"The story of TECO on the PDP-8 is convoluted. Russ Hamm implemented TECO under his OS8 (without a slash) system, and then gave a listing to Don Baccus at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) who, along with Barry Smith ported it to PS/8. This was the beginning of what became Oregon Software, later famous for OMSI Pascal."