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by Rick DeNatale.
Original Post: The OTI Brotherhood
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A week ago today, I travelled up to Grand Rapids Michigan, to give my RubyConf 2008 talk to XP West Michigan at . XP West Michigan is an enthusiastic group of software craftsmen, who were great hosts.
This trip came about thanks to my friend and former colleague at OTI, Paul Vanderlei, now of Band XI a small consulting company comprised of former OTIers. Paul blogged about the talk here.
I spent the last, and best, part of my IBM career at OTI, and I’m feeling nostalgic, so if you’ll humor me a bit, I’d like to reminisce publically a bit.
Object Technology, or OTI, was founded by Dave Thomas, who was on the faculty at Carleton University, in Ottawa Canada. Dave along with a couple of other Carleton faculty including John Pugh, and Wilf LaLonde, introduced Smalltalk as the introductory programming language. Just to be clear, this is a different Dave Thomas than the Dave Thomas of the Pragmatic Programmers, who is probably better known to a lot of my readers. OTI was started by Dave and his wife, staffed by a few of his students. Within OTI Dave was known by several names including “Big Dave”, which distinguished him from Dave Thomson, one of the first OTIers, but most often we called him DAT.
OTI wasn’t the only Ottawa based Smalltalk oriented company spun off from Carleton, John and Wilf started The Object People, which, among other things produced TopLink one of the first object-relational mapping packages, an ancestor of ActiveRecord. TopLink, like VisualAge made the jump from Smalltalk to Java and is now an Oracle product.
Early on, OTI viewed embedded applications as a target for Smalltalk. OTI was one of the companies which produced Smalltalk virtual machines, but tended to stay slightly in the background. They did several VMs for embedded systems, but they also implemented the VM for the Macintosh version of Smalltalk/V, which was sold by Digitalk, so many users didn’t know of it’s true source.
John Duimovich was the VM team lead back then.
The majority of the old time Smalltalkers remember OTI for Envy/Developer, the first version and configuration management system for Smalltalk. OTI was one of the pioneers in applying agile iterative development processes to medium to large-scale projects, and Envy was a key enabling technology.
I first started interacting with OTI and DAT as part of the early OOPSLA community, and then as the VisualAge saga unfolded, a story I related a while back. Dave is, and always has been, an iconoclast, unafraid to tell the truth as he sees it, no matter what the recipient of his message feels. Bearding the lion in its den is DAT’s stock in trade. In 1992, I organized a panel at OOPSLA which explored the pros and cons of software “methodologies” versus the more pragmatic approach of code-driven development. DAT and I were on the pragmatic side, opposite a couple of icons of OO methodologies, Peter Coad, and Grady Booch. I’m pretty sure that Grady has forgiven me, I’m not so sure about Peter.
As a result of OTI’s contributions to VisualAge, it was acquired by IBM, and became a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM Canada. Shortly after this happened, Dave decided to “raid” IBM and drafted a few IBMers on the VisualAge development team in RTP to work at OTI’s lab in Raleigh. Besides me, the draftees included Tim Wolf (who had spearheaded the mainframe version of IBM/Smalltalk),
Patrick Mueller (my evil twin), and Scott deDeugd, with Dave Lavin and Randy Caroll following shortly thereafter.
OTI tended to build laboratories around key people. For example, DAT hired Erich Gamma and opened an OTI lab in Zurich. Labs in Sydney Australia, Victoria British Columbia, Minneapolis, Raleigh and Amsterdam were all part of the OTI “Empire” with its capital in Ottawa. Before I was drafted, I got to spend a month in the Sydney lab working with Jeff McAffer on a server Smalltalk product combining many of Jeff’s ideas with my earlier work on VisualAge/Smalltalk Distributed Jeff went on to be one of the key architects of Eclipse which arose like a Phoenix from the VisualAge IDE.
OTI was an oasis of pragmatic software development within the Big Blue Mothership. OTI introduced IBM to agile development methods, most notably strictly time-boxed delivery with flexible content definition. This required a process which made sure that the system was always ready to ‘ship’ even though it might not be complete according to the plan. Today we call this continuous integration.
DAT is still at it. When I was in Grand Rapids, Paul told me about his recent attendance at Eclipse Summit Europe where DAT gave a keynote where he excoriated Java as the “new COBOL” with an audience full of Java afficionados. That’s DAT for you. From what Paul tells me, JavaScript has caught DATs attention of late.
Pat Mueller has a a Planet OTI site which provides an RSS feed for this blog along with many other blogs by former OTIers. It’s a good place to meet quite a few interesting people.
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