This appendix contains a number of quotes from VMSHARE that illustrate what the users themselves feel as the benefits of the conference are.
I use VMSHARE as a way to get information and a way to ask questions without anyone claiming to be too busy to help.. someone out there will probably respond.
There is very little doubt in my mind that the single greatest benefit to me personally has been the use of VMSHARE as a means of keeping in touch with issues. This system keeps me in almost constant contact with my peers. These are people spread quite literally all about the globe, a with whom I would otherwise have little or no opportunity for intellectual exchange. On VMSHARE, I can broadcast an opinion, or a question, or a thought; and provoke discussion that I would have found impossible by any other means I can think of.
I drive to work with a specialist in solar energy. He turned green with envy when I showed VMSHARE to him. When you are only one or two people working on a given field in an organization you may feel ISOLATED. Going to conferences may help, but the real cure for isolation is TELEconferencing. VMSHARE is the global VM-village.
My reason for being active was that it was just too long between SHAREs to do without my teachers, and I didn't like to bother them by phone. VMSHARE let me ask my question when I wanted to ask it, and they could answer when (and IF) they wanted to. The value was that someone would answer within hours with an answer that was pretty easy for a novice like me to understand. After a while, someone would ask a question I could answer, and I felt it only fair to pay back for what I had received. Meanwhile, VMSHARE just grew and grew.
The following was sent to me by the former European co-ordinator of VMSHARE and provides very interesting and personal insights into many of the topics I've dealt with in the bulk of the paper.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was working at Commercial Union in the mid-70's. In these days, EVERYONE recognised that VM as shipped was effectively unusable in a production environment (accounting to REAL punched cards for example), and any self-respecting PSR delivering a VM system to a previously non-VM site (VM was delivered by hand in those days) would scrounge an up-to-date copy of the Waterloo Library (6) from one of his other customers and take it along with him as a goodwill gift.
As the trainee VM Sysprog (I was "suddenly" promoted from trainee to "the" VM Sysprog when my supervisor and mentor was tempted away by the siren call of more money (yes, he gave up VM for money! - strange fellow ...)) I read the Waterloo Library from BOT-strip to EOT-strip avidly and repeatedly. Like Joe found, the names held a magical ring all of their own - the same names, the same magic. Unlike Joe, I was a whole continent away - it really seemed ludicrous to imagine regular conversations with these giants. My burning ambition of the time was to make a contribution to the Waterloo Library. (I made one eventually, but for the life of me can't remember what it was now. So much for ambition.)
In those days, CU ran OS/VS1 under VM, and here on the tape was a set of mods to VM called SIONW, contributed by some guy called John Alvord at TASC, that improved VS1 performance on systems with busy disks (just like ours). I put it on and it worked a treat. However, some problem arose (again, I can't remember the details now, but it turned out to be quite small in the end), and we had to turn off SIONW. Operations screamed blue murder and the Chief Systems Programmer authorised me to send a cable to TASC asking John if he knew of the problem. (I know, nowadays we'd just pick up the 'phone, but in 1977 I'd never made an international phone call in my life - let alone a transatlantic call!) I got back the wierdest cable - it just said "Phone ... and British Airways and ask about VMSHARE". I wish I still had that telex, for one thing it would remind me just WHO it was at BA that I called - I know his name but it just won't come back to me. Secondly, it was the trigger of a whole new era of communications. That's my trouble, no sense of history. I throw away telexs and keep entire libraries of Honeywell Series 200 Mod 1(TR) manuals!
Needless to say, I 'phoned BA, he explained about VMSHARE and lent me his VMSHARE id to get in touch with John. Our SIONW problem was soon resolved, but I was bitten by the bug and wasn't going to let go! I screwed up the courage and MADE that transatlantic 'phone call - to Dewayne Hendricks. (I imagined Dewayne, from his voice, as being about six-foot-six and built like a football-player. Boy was I surprised when I met him!) "Look, I said, CU's a SEAS member, won't that do?". Well, after Dewayne had a little talk with Dave Smith and I agreed to "sell" VMSHARE within SEAS, VMSEAS was born.
Even today, the number of regular SEAS contributors to VMSHARE is really quite small, but I think VMSEAS brought about a change in attitude within VMSHARE in that the conference was now explicitly and truly international. VMSHARErs started moving around between each others' conferences. Americans would arrange their European holidays to coincide with SEAS meetings, Europeans would arrange their American holidays to coincide with SHARE meetings. The ice was broken, we were assured of a welcome in each others camps and it was sufficient for a few of us to actually take that step into the unknown. I shall never ever forget my first night at SHARE 52. Lost in a sea of 4,000+ people, wondering just what the hell I was doing there. Wandering round looking at badges, trying to find a familiar name. Recognising a name in a group of people and hovering at the fringe of the group. Someone noticing me, failing to recognise my face, glancing at my badge, glancing away, doing a double-take, turning back, smiling, and saying "Hi Jeff, what are YOU doing here!." In ten minutes I felt like I had been there all my life.
I think that VM's incompleteness contributed substantially to VMSHARE's reaching "critical mass". If VM had been sold then, as MVS was and as VM is now, as a complete package, the motivations to be involved in VMSHARE would have been completely different. VMSHARE was (and still is) not about solving bugs. It was about solving PROBLEMS, discussing PROBLEMS, finding developing and sharing SOLUTIONS. Bug-stomping was (and is) an incidental pastime. If VM had already "officially" contained all the solutions we would never have wanted to talk to each other in the first place. (We might have NEEDED to, but would we have WANTED to?)
Jeff Gribbin Ex SEAS/VMSHARE Coordinator 1977-sometime-or-other.
*** APPENDED 05/30/89 07:03:55 BY _RR/JEFF ***
(6) The Waterloo library is a collection of user contributed programs and procedures that were distributed throughout the USA and Europe. It was and still is based at the University of Waterloo, Canada.