Merge pull request #1178 from mhjacks/master

Memorialize NCR MP-RAS

Author: jerodsanto

shipit/ship-it-115.md

@@ -158,13 +158,13 @@ But that was one of the things that we used to help show that there was value in
 
 **Justin Garrison:** Git push.
 
-**Martin Jackson:** The store workflow was actually developed during the proprietary Unix era. The way that all of this happened was that there were a smorgasbord of potential commercial Unix'es that were available for store deployments. And did you know that NCR made a Unix once upon a time? Oh, buddy... Yes, they did. It was called \[unintelligible 00:23:26.09\]
+**Martin Jackson:** The store workflow was actually developed during the proprietary Unix era. The way that all of this happened was that there were a smorgasbord of potential commercial Unix'es that were available for store deployments. And did you know that NCR made a Unix once upon a time? Oh, buddy... Yes, they did. It was called MP-RAS.
 
 **Justin Garrison:** Everyone made Unix at the time. I'm sure every company out there had a Unix flavor.
 
-**Martin Jackson:** Yeah. Well, we had \[unintelligible 00:23:32.00\] HP-UX, and we had AIX. And all of the basic store deployment systems were based on this. And so all of the tool chains were based on the idea that your application could be running on any of these three Unix'es. Why three, you may ask? Because Walmart is a retailer, and Walmart's differentiator for years and years and years and years was always price. So the way that you get prices down in a store is to say "You sell soap, you sell soap. Who's going to have the lowest price point? You two work it out." And "Well, we'll buy this much. We'll save this much at this price. We'll save this much at this price."
+**Martin Jackson:** Yeah. Well, we had MP-RAS, HP-UX, and we had AIX. And all of the basic store deployment systems were based on this. And so all of the tool chains were based on the idea that your application could be running on any of these three Unix'es. Why three, you may ask? Because Walmart is a retailer, and Walmart's differentiator for years and years and years and years was always price. So the way that you get prices down in a store is to say "You sell soap, you sell soap. Who's going to have the lowest price point? You two work it out." And "Well, we'll buy this much. We'll save this much at this price. We'll save this much at this price."
 
-So Walmart had for years operated the strategic vendor environment where vendors were expected to compete with each other on the basis of price. And this worked in technology, too. So for the different Unix variants, they basically threw it out for quarter era bids. "We're gonna retrofit 200 stores this quarter. What's your bid for hardware and software?" And whoever came in with the lowest bid was the one who won. So are we deploying HP this year? Are we deploying \[unintelligible 00:24:36.05\] NPRS this year? Are we deploying AIX this year? Who knows...?! We didn't know. They didn't know. But all of our systems had to have the same basic capability.
+So Walmart had for years operated the strategic vendor environment where vendors were expected to compete with each other on the basis of price. And this worked in technology, too. So for the different Unix variants, they basically threw it out for quarter era bids. "We're gonna retrofit 200 stores this quarter. What's your bid for hardware and software?" And whoever came in with the lowest bid was the one who won. So are we deploying HP this year? Are we deploying MP-RAS this year? Are we deploying AIX this year? Who knows...?! We didn't know. They didn't know. But all of our systems had to have the same basic capability.
 
 Now, years went by, and at this point of Walmart's history, it was solidly into virtualization. So it was all Zen and VMware at this point. So we didn't have the proprietary Unix component of all of this, but we did have a lot of the tooling that had existed from that era, because all the migrations and everything. So we had an internal build and packaging system that would compile the application code. Yes, compile. Because a lot of these applications were 4GL, ESQLC. And yes, I kid you not, COBOL.