Subject: Re: Unicode/10646 History (was Re: [idn] An ignorant question about TC<-> SC)

From: Kenneth Whistler <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 15:54:58 -0800 (PST)

Eric,

I was under the apparent misapprehension that you were asking a
serious question when you asked:

> Exactly who, from what group, was, in 1990, participating in the
> activity from SMI, and from IBM?
>
> Again, in 1992, for DEC, SMI, and HP.

And that "the activity" referred to the Unicode Consortium's
activity in standardization, and or those participating in the
standardization of 10646. That is what Mark Davis was talking
about.

But apparently, you meant it as a rhetorical quiz regarding
Unix vendor OS development staff involved in adapting UTF-8.

> SMI == Sun Microsystems. You have to find a person then in Building 5.
> If you come up with someone other than John E. or myself, we'll be ...
> surprised.

The answer to the question *I* was answering is Bill Tuthill.

> 
> Hmm, not AIX dev at Locus, nor AIX dev in Austin, nor ACIS dev in Yorktown,
> nor ACIS dev in PASC (me again, plus Austin).

Well, if you want to get pissy about it, there was also a wholly owned
IBM subsidiary in Mountain View called Metaphor, which had a
non-Unix OS, and the people in charge of the Unicode adaptation
in that OS were Mike Kernaghan and myself. But since Metaphor
soon after went under, I guess you can give me an honorary defunct
system point for that one, just as for DEC.

> 
> Well, that's where os product was done. Not in Toronto. 

So? I was answering a different question than you are answering.
Isai Scheinberg was the IBM guy working on Unicode and 10646 --
not the AIX guys.

> The right answer is
> Gary Miller, Austin, but he'd give you the same answer I have. Another miss.
> If the game was "What unit that did IBM's C compiler?", you'd get a point.

And two demerits to Eric for engaging in deliberate sophistry.

> 
> Mike wasn't in COSL. His group, along with Judy Chen, were on the opposite
> side of the cafeteria from the operating systems people, though he was on
> our cc distributions. His unit (corp-l10n) was being decimated when I was
> at COSL. The right answer is (I can see his face ...) Larry ??? Yet another
> miss.

And Larry Dwyer never attended a UTC meeting -- which was the point.
Mike Ksar did.

> I'll give you the DEC person, they were already tanking in '94, making a deal
> with MicroSoft, and off the Unix standards stage.

Thank you for your unpretentious generosity on that point at least.

> 
> This is fun. Keep swinging. Maybe you can prove that Unicode came from some
> other venue than the printer bits of my clients, and I was simply to dull to
> appreciate this higher truth. 

??? This is a wondrous origin myth indeed. "Unicode came from the printer
bits of my clients..." We'll keep that in mind when rewriting the
introduction for Unicode 4.0.

--Ken

> You'll need to show that the strategic and
> technical managers I knew at SMI|IBM|HP had evil twins, but that shouldn't
> be a problem.
> 
> Eric
> Founder, X/Open; Principal Author, XPG/1
> Founder, COSE; Co-Author, Spec1170, published as XPG/4.2
> 
> 
>

---

From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2001 19:30:51 -0500

Ken,

Bill Tuthill? He worked in techpubs. Try saying "Eric Brunner managed (or
mismanaged if that is easier to say) the systems group, which include the
i18n sub-group, at Sun, after John Entemann." Maybe that will help.

Metaphore was so far from Austin ... it was further away than PASC (Palo
Alto Scientific Center). Sorry for your loss. Maybe you met Phil Sherin.

Larry wouldn't go to a UTC meeting. He had the 9.x 10.x 11.x series of soft
ware and hardware hurdles to make. Mike got cc'd on i18n related stuff, like
fixes for HP-15, new locales. He didn't make policy. It wasn't important. It
was optional, and the multi-byte work was largely driven by the standards
conformance instrument I caused to exist -- the horrid XPG4.2 base and
extended test suite, which we waived routinely. I personally lead the work
on HP-UX 10.10. I was there.

You've confused the periperal activities of (large, diverse) companies with
(then) some disposable income, with core business units. Look at the agenda
for COSE, it wasn't there. That's 1993 and very serious market planners.

If you want to show that lots-a-people contributed to your work, fine.

If you want to show that your work was even above the horizon for Unix
technical and strategic marketing managers, I don't know how you'll do
it. Be creative. I'm remembering things I didn't even know I'd forgotten.

Eric