Forum dress rehearsal: behind the scenes - includes a related article on the format followed by the Forum, and a related article on the purpose of office automation - director's script for the 1991 platforms for Computing Forum

RELease 1.0, Feb 25, 1991 by Esther Dyson

On the other hand, Rothschild is no apologist for business in general. His theory of bionomics also explains the fate of the venture capitalists who invest in also-ran companies, whose "ecological" niches are already filled with stronger competitors. (Is GO such a case, or has it found a new ecological niche in which it can compete with Microsoft on its own terms?)

Just as living things are the embodiment of the information carried in their genes (and "fitter" genes win out in the long run), so are companies an embodiment of their intellectual property, which includes not just patents and copyrights but subtler forms such as policies, procedures and even attitudes and corporate memory. (Many groupware products reflect an implicit attempt to capture, represent and disseminate this intellectual property reliably.)

"Legacy" is a mainframer's euphemism for old applications. It sounds much nicer, doesn't it?

The focus of the second day is application development, and the reuse in the process of existing modules of wisdom, models, objects, procedures - i.e. legacies. The essence of an application is specifying routine procedures so that they can be executed by a computer, with different data, conditions and other parameters each time. You can't reuse a legacy unless you can find and define it and have a way of talking to it.

Objects are a way of representing data and procedures for easy reuse. They have well-defined ways of behaving, and protocols that they respond to. A user need not - may not - look at their insides, but should instead simply manipulate them. "Object-oriented" means a lot more than "written in Smalltalk." The speeches and discussions on Tuesday will discuss some of those divergent meanings, and their implications.

Yes, you can get there from here

For Bill Gates, object-orientation begins in the operating system - and the operating system begins with Windows. He will talk about why you need object linking and embedding in the operating system, not just added on. This will help to solve some fundamental problems: What do you do when the object you're talking to isn't there? Or when someone upgrades the application? You need something with authority - i.e., the operating system - to monitor and manage the state of the whole environment, not just the objects at one desk (and not just the user's file system, for that matter). And of course, Gates will talk about why Windows is the best place to start from.

The name Windows" is a cover story for a progression of changing, and improving, operating systems, starting with DOS and leading up to a portable, 32-bit system with all the fundamental capabilities of OS/2, including multi-threading and pre-emptive multi-tasking. Overall, the OS/2 and Windows conflict is overblown; people were hoping for a consistency that was not to be. Whereas UNIX has been converging, but not to a single implementation, OS/2 and Windows are diverging, but not from a single implementation.

They already have different GUIs and different kernels. Microsoft's platform-independent, RISC-supporting New Technology" will have yet another different kernel, but with capabilities beyond those now in OS/2, including object-linking and embedding, and supporting current APIs including OS/2 and Windows. Although IBM and Microsoft are cross-licensing their development work, consider the inevitable incompatibilities as an opportunity for third parties to provide insulating cross-platform tools and layers.