Comment of the Day - February 10, 2005 - Lessons Learn in Brazil

This articles and the comments contain confessions of past personal errors. I am in the mood to some confession today.

I am from Brazil, and I was working at Eletronorte (Centrais Eletricas do Norte do Brasil - Electrical Centrals of Northern Brazil) at the Data Processing Department, a segment of the Vice-Presidency of Engineering and the computer was an IBM mainframe. We developed and maintained programs for energy reservoir calculations and power generation written in Fortran. The company paid lots of money to IBM in hardware and software maintenance. Then CDC installed a supercomputer in Rio de Janeiro and was marketing a cool system, called Cybernet, which was a thin client network connected to the server through telephone lines. You could develop scientific programs in Fortran using a keyboard, screen and printer, paying by the hour, like today's cybercafes. We engineers were becoming hooked by the idea.

Then my boss, who was an important member of Eletronorte, gave me the task to write a justification of why we should not use the Cybernet. I was young, and liked challenges, so I wrote a convincing text as requested, which cooled off the enthusiasm about the Cybernet for good. I thought I did great, and my boss gave me a promotion. Not bad for a recently graduated engineer to manage a section, having a few members holding master degrees. That is what I thought then.

Much later, I really regretted what I had done. Maybe that is the reason why I saw so much value in the GNU manifesto and the Linux OS kernel when I saw it. It was because I had lost a chance to change history and curb the IBM monopoly. Imagine if I had been smart enough and had refused to write lies on paper. I would be fired, then I would join CDC, go to the papers to tell my story, and market the Cybernet. The history of computing would take a different path.

So if any of you is young and ambitious, fear not and go ahead and fight for what is right. You will have nothing to regret in the future.

Mario Miyojim