An Interview with Watts Humphrey, Part 16: Semiconductor and Software Quality and the Revolution of CI-105
This interview was provided courtesy of the Computer History Museum.
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Vision of the Future
Humphrey: Now another thing I
didn’t mention, when I was on corporate staff, remember I had the job or I was
looking at the IBM Business System?
Booch: Right.
Humphrey: One of the things I was
asked to look at was where we were going as a business. We had various task
forces looking at stuff. I remember we had a task force looking at terminals
and communications and stuff. I ran a host of these things in terms of the
future. I remember somebody saying, “How do we define an intelligent terminal?”
Remember, this was in a meeting in about 1972 or something like that in
corporate. I said, “The definition of intelligent terminal, I believe, is one
that will run MVS.” People laughed. They thought that was crazy, but it’s true.
But what was interesting to me was--
Booch: You foreshadowed the notions of
workstations.
Humphrey: Yes, exactly. But I
could see the networks coming. I could see the whole idea of vastly increased
power and remote workstations. I could see the enormous needs for compatibility
and dynamic networks and all that kind of stuff and the tremendous growth of
programming. In fact, I was arguing strenuously when I was talking about the
cost, customer’s cost. Where did the customers’ money go? Customers’ money
basically was going increasingly to software. I showed these charts of where
their money was going in terms of spending on support systems and application
systems. They weren’t spending it on hardware; they were spending it on writing
programs and installing operating systems. They weren’t spending it on buying
programs, because they weren’t priced. We just started to price them. There
wasn’t much money in it yet. But the cost -- more than 50 percent of their cost
-- was now in stuff other than hardware and it was going up exponentially.
So my contention was
we were looking at the wrong target. We had to move. No reaction, no interest
whatever. But even though I could see that, I couldn’t put together enough of a
picture to make a case. I must admit, the future surprised me as much as
everybody else. I wasn’t the only one. I had a few allies, but not a whole lot,
way back in those days.
Technology Assessment
Okay, now I was on
corporate staff. This was in 1979. It was getting kind of late. I talked to my
boss and I had been working with the lawyers. I was involved in all the
lawsuits and I was advising the lawyers and all this stuff. But I wasn’t
building anything. I wasn’t learning anything. I wasn’t doing anything. I had a
modest staff and a big, prestigious job, but it wasn’t really terribly
interesting anymore. I’d sort of been there long enough. I learned a hell of a
lot. So I was talking about where to go next, and I was saying I would like to
go back and run a lab or do something like that. I knew I wasn’t going to be
king anymore. So I got a call to see if I would come down and work for a guy,
Art Anderson, who had just taken over as the new group vice president running
all the development divisions -- development and manufacturing.
So I went and talked
to Art. He wanted me to be director of technology, basically technology
assessment. I guess that’s what it was, Director of Technology Assessment. He
told me about how they’d done assessments in the various research labs. Basically,
it was a way to get groups to assess themselves of where they stood versus
technology versus what was going on in the world. Were they really doing
superior work? Where could they improve? It was a way to get groups to sort of
wake them up and think about how they could move and what they could do better.
So I agreed to do it.
I joined him, and I
had to build a small staff of folks. I got people out of various labs to come
and work with me temporarily on a one year assignment. I got people from
Booch: If I can ask, where was this
office physically set up? Where you working at this time now?
Humphrey: It was in
Booch: Okay.
Humphrey: It was the
headquarters of all the development folks.
Booch: Got it.
Semiconductor Quality
Humphrey: One of the things
that I hit almost immediately turned out to be very interesting. I learned a
lot about it, because I learned what assessments were and how powerful they
could be -- self- assessments. We learned, by looking at some of this stuff,
that the costs of our semiconductor chips, as manufactured in our
It was an enormous
place -- made all of our chips -- but they weren’t competitive. They did a
self-assessment. I went back and forth helping them pull it together and
learned a hell of a lot about chips and chip manufacturing and quality. They
actually brought the yield of chip manufacturing up to a very high number. I
don’t know what it was. I certainly don’t remember. I probably knew at the
time, but their yield had been like 20 percent. I think it was up to like about
80 percent. It was purely quality management. That’s all they did. But they
really went through it. They crawled through it all. They looked at what
everybody else was doing. Of course, the actual yield achieved was a highly
classified number. Nobody would tell it. It was competitively extraordinarily
important. But they actually got to where they were the lowest cost
manufacturer in the world. They did it fast. It was amazing to me how quickly
they were able to absolutely change their stripes. They became the leader in
memory chips for some time.
I learned a hell of a
lot about quality and quality management and the W.E. Deming stuff and how you
manage quality. That served me in good stead later with the software community.
As a matter of fact, one question came up and that was: Could we take any of
the lessons from that and use them in software? Art asked the question. As I
say, Art had some very interesting perceptions. So we pulled together a group
of experts from software and the semiconductor group and had a session on it to
see was there anything we could gain from that, between the software and
semiconductor guys. The software reaction was, “No, there’s nothing we can
learn from this.” There was no real interest in looking any further.
Another thing: I
mentioned Gartner, Gideon Gartner. While I was working for Art Anderson,
increasingly we were having people leave to go work for Gideon Gartner, who
just started this little group. They were basically a group spying on IBM,
trying to get clues as to what IBM was doing. A good friend of mine, Tom Crotty, had joined Gideon Gartner. IBM was very upset with
Gartner and they were trying to figure out, “How can we shut these guys down? They’re
doing something illegal, etc., etc.” So Art asked me to go meet with Gideon,
which I did. I had quite a discussion with Gideon on this whole thing. Interesting guy.
As you know, the
Gartner Group is doing a lot of stuff these days. But I’m sure they’re still
doing much the same. They were sort of a spy shop, checking on what everybody
was doing. But nonetheless, I met with him, but I didn’t really make a whole
lot of headway. We ended up suing him anyway.
Next, Art Anderson was
moved on. I don’t know where he went. Jack Kuehler
replaced him. Remember I mentioned that Bob Evans had said there were two guys
who were on the list to be IBM president/CEO down the road?
Booch: Right.
Humphrey: It was me and Jack Kuehler. When I was running the Endicott lab, he was
running the
Booch: Did you burn some little things
so that it either made a white smoke or a black smoke when you were done?
Humphrey: That’s right, pretty
much -- the idea of just locking people up and giving them a clear charter and
you’ve got to go back and help them. Then frequently they needed some
motivation and some facilitation. But they did a great job. Did I tell you the
PC story?
Software Quality and Process
Humphrey: Art
Booch: Did IBM have a mandatory
retirement age at that time for its executives?
Humphrey: No. Senior execs had
to retire at 60, like the CEO. I don’t know if the senior group executives did
or not. But the CEO, Tom Watson, had basically decreed that. A lot of people
thought that he put it in place so that Learson would
be forced out in two years. I think Tom was scared that Learson
would be a little roughshod and he was. Tom had real insight. So I think it was
just the CEO had to retire at age 60. Everybody else was 65. In any event, I
had five to ten years to go. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. So Jack said,
“Well, look, there are a couple of things. You could either run one of these programming
shops we’ve got that are running the lab computer shops.” He said, “That’s one.
Let me think about some others.”
A few days later he
came back and said, “One job I’d really like you to consider is to take over as
Director of Software Quality and Process.” It’s the group in
CI-105
It was a fascinating
staff job, but it got me back into programming and it got me back thinking
about programming quality. There were a bunch of things involved with that. One
was fascinating. It was called CI-105, Corporate Instruction 105. IBM had put
out a corporate instruction on quality. It was for the company’s products, all
products. It required that each new product have better quality than its
predecessor IBM products and better quality than the best competitors, the leading
competitive products.
Booch: Did you have a sense for how to
measure quality then, so you knew what you were going against?
Humphrey: Good question. The
hardware guys had a measure that everybody had been using. It was called RAs or
repair actions. The maintenance community that did the hardware maintenance had
lots of measures of RA. The thing that was absolutely astounding about actually
measuring and tracking quality and managing it step by step, they had to
project what the quality was going to be before they could announce the
product. They had to show what they were doing. People had to review and concur
with it. They tracked it. When people missed their quality goal, they had to
come in with action plans. And so it was really managed and people were really
paying attention from the top. On one file system they had a quality
improvement in RAs of over 1,000 times.
The numbers were
absolutely extraordinary. They had another thing with the shipment of IBM’s
largest machines out of the factory. For instance, out at
Amdahl at that time
was installing machines in about three to five days. It was an enormous
problem. When you have a great big system and a machine room, people can’t shut
their whole business down for 10 days. Most of them don’t have backup systems.
At least they didn’t then. They don’t have all the machine rooms, so they
really had to be able to pull them out and put them in quickly. So they set a
goal, and the people in