Real Time View Story Telling

Once again, it was travel that dominated the calendar for 2024. Some of the trips were planned well ahead of schedule while others occurred on just a week’s notice. Flying to London for less than 48 hours so that Margo and I could participate in June’s BITUG BIG SIG event being one of the more extreme examples. However, we were not alone in our commitment to supporting the NonStop community, as I am certain you will hear of many similar stories being told as 2024 winds down.

Looking forward to the holidays? For North Americans, it is following the usual pattern. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas and the New Year. It’s as if there is a sense of urgency to get to 2025 even as it looks like a rush to get the many stays away from the office checked off. Done that! On to the next! What’s the plan and what’s upcoming? If you are from the southern hemisphere, you will have celebrated the Melbourne Cup on the first Tuesday in November which, in turn, marks the start of corporation end of year celebrations where, in Sydney at least, every luncheon party boat has been reserved many months ago.

All good fun. In the years I lived and worked in Sydney, this annual rush to entertain clients under the pretense of rewarding them for the continued support, began with the annual trip up the coast to the seaside town of Terrigal. This was the venue for the annual gathering of the New South Wales chapter of the Australian Computer Society where invited guests included Gene Amdahl and where the first primitive Apple was featured. As for me, this was a long weekend spent poolside soaking up the first rays of the Aussie summer. It was the late ‘70s when there were only whispers about a fault tolerant system coming to market. Back then, it was articles featuring Plug Compatible Mainframes that dominated the media.

This annual pilgrimage to Terrigal has long since fallen dormant as virtual communities grow and few seem to enjoy such broad, industry-wide gatherings, but the one thing that stood out this year for Margo and me was the continued enthusiasm of the NonStop community to continue their support for conferences and events, worldwide. Celebrating fifty years of NonStop certainly proved to be a tangible reminder of so much goodness that came with the arrival of the industry’s first fault tolerant system, Tandem Computers’ NonStop system.

The arrival of NonStop saw a rush by other vendors to enter the field all with varying degrees of success. Stratus took a shot even as IBM licensed these systems, marketing them as System/88 only to see warehouses outside of Raleigh’s Research Triangle Park quickly fill up with unsold inventory. But commitments were commitments, after all. Shame corporate IT didn’t think that way. Working at the time for Nixdorf Computers I recall the company licensing a likely forgotten fault tolerant line out of New Jersey only to see Heinz Nixdorf retelling the story of how the only thing fault tolerant about them was his salesforce.

None of this seemed to derail the rapid success of NonStop that powered through all challenges until well into the ‘90s. What started as a whisper, became a roar, and to realize just how valuable NonStop proved to be to corporate IT and to the enterprise businesses where they were deployed is something we can all be proud of and only too willing to share with everyone we know. What conferences and events in 2024 demonstrated so well, there continues to be no lessening of enthusiasm to keep these stories coming.

In the cold hard light of today, with these conferences and events well and truly behind us, what Margo and I find most encouraging is the return to promoting solutions on NonStop. NonStop should never be viewed as an insider special, known only to a select group identified by their dual handle coffee mugs and tie-die tee shirts. As much as such trinkets continue to be admired, and their appearance witness to a rapid take-up as keepsakes, the return to promotion and publicizing of solutions on NonStop is good news. Do you pay attention to LinkedIn and have you seen how many daily references are being made?

Whether it’s coming from NonStop boss’ Casey Taylor, or simply being dutifully reposted by our own Iain Liston-Brown, LinkedIn always seems to be highlighting something from Lusis to the financial services industry, abat+ to the manufacturing industry, but wait there’s more. Who knows all that much about NonStop providing Australia’s nationwide support for aircraft flight plan recording? Who is staying atop of the NonStop support for one of the largest container transshipment ports in Singapore? And yes, have we forgotten about just how many credit card transactions still pass through at least one NonStop system.

For 2025, I will be encouraging a greater dialogue among NonStop community members on what solutions are running today on NonStop. In so doing, I will be looking at the breadth of deployments and challenging the HPE marketing team to shine an even brighter spotlight on the accomplishments of NonStop customers. We can say what we like about the ups and downs of the NonStop trajectory and reminisce about former times, but the reality of today is how NonStop remains a force to be reckoned with in IT.

In case you missed it, I just posted to LinkedIn having seen a post from Lusis on their elasticity on HPE NonStop due to TS/MP. It’s where I commented: “Pathway has always been the “special sauce” that makes NonStop effectively your OneStop cloud-in-a-box solution that gives you back control of costs and security!” Did you see it? Were you tempted to add your own comment? The question here is, why not? Did you think about reposting to your own community – again, why not? Marketing today is a lot more than word-of-mouth and calls for us all to be active participants in broadcasting NonStop to the world.

As we head into 2025 let me encourage you all – speak up for NonStop. There are plenty of media channels where your voice can be heard. As for Margo and me, we continue to blog almost daily and if as yet, you haven’t seen all of our latest commentaries and posts, then you may want to start by checking out these channels:

For the NonStop community there is Real Time View blog –
https://itug-connection.blogspot.com/

For our social connections there is Buckle-Up-Travel blog –
https://buckle-up-travel.blogspot.com/

For the Connect Community publication, there is Real Time View column–
https://connect2nonstop.com/

For updates on Facebook, there is now a Real Time View group –
https://www.facebook.com/groups/145269955527534

For commentaries on LinkedIn, there is the Real Time View group –
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/1878133/

We hope you will feel encouraged to create your own posts or at least comment on ours!
Long live NonStop!