Sandy Moy, President of SHARE, convened the meeting which was held in the Anaheim convention center arena. We had a grand total of 4300 or so attendees at this SHARE, not a record by any means. Sandy introduced VIPs from our sister groups (GUIDE, SEAS, COMMON) and presented "President's Awards" to two longtime SHARE participants: Ron Thielen and John McCann. (John was a classmate of mine at UCF twenty years ago (!). My first reaction when he was honored was: What is this world coming to? I eventually did manage to calm down and congratulate him.)
Our speaker was Mike Saranga, IBM's Assistant General Manager for Programming Systems, whose prime responsibility is AIX, and who is also the current chairman of OSF (Open Systems Foundation). He came to discuss IBM's commitment to open systems, and to freely dispense motherhood and warm fuzzies.
IBM has taken so much heat in recent years that it is becoming traditional for the General Session speaker to confess IBM's sins of the past. This SHARE was no exception, and Mike Saranga punctuated his talk with phrases like "We were convinced we knew what you wanted... but we were doing all the talking", and "Even old IBM executives can learn new tricks".
IBM appears committed to TCP/IP, and as Saranga pointed out, "a de facto TCP/IP standard is already implemented" across many systems. IBM's operating systems will become POSIX compliant in the near future; there are already announcements for MVS and OS/400.
Scheduled for delivery this year are: