June 12, 1988

FACES FROM THE PAST: Hey, guess who just called me? My old chemistry professor from Cal Poly, Grant Venerable. I first met Venerable when I was 17 and he visited my high school physics class. That’s when I first heard of the Taxonomy of a Unity invented by mathematician Terry Braithwaite, which Venerable said could solve problems in any system from chemistry to human interaction.

Venerable has a Ph.D. in the philosophy of physical chemistry, and does oil paintings of molecular structures that hang everywhere from GE’s Plastics Technology Center to the Soviet Union. He is a free thinker, and like so many whose lives follow less traditional courses, his career has had its ups and downs, to say the least.

I’d lost track of him after we both left San Luis Obispo. Among other things, he spent a few years working in the Valley for companies like Motorola, as a “quality educator” in strategic planning. He’s also just finishing a program for the IBM PC that puts Braithwaite’s taxonomy into software. (He calls it the VenMatrix.) Right now it’s being tested in the realm of government economics — it makes sense of the scores of software models that economists use to make their predictions — but Venerable says it will eventually be used everywhere.

“It addresses the issue of the natural limits of any system,” he says. “It helps people be clear about their intentions and helps them sort the elements of any problem.”

Also as a result of his experience in high tech and everything else, he’s written a trippy book called “The Paradox of the Silicon Savior: Charting the Reformation of the High-Tech Super-State.” It’s published by MVM Productions here in San Francisco, and is a personal/political/”socio-chemical” (among other things) look at what high tech has done for and to us, and where this Jacob’s ladder is leading.

SUN SITS: I’m hearing conflicting reports on Ron Posner, the former Anza/Borland International software executive with the Midas touch. (He sold Anza’s Paradox to Borland for $37 million.) He’d been chosen to birth Sun Microsystems’ new baby, a retail Unix software division dubbed Solaris. But I hear the deal is off.

First I heard Posner had presented Sun execs with a laundry list of questions about the project and they answered “nay” too many times. “No one said no to anything specifically,” counters Posner. “But today Sun is a $1 billion company. A $5 million division won’t get a lot of time and attention.”

Another industry insider says that wasn’t the case. “Posner’s implying he walked away? Well, I guess you could say that,” says my source. “They told him he wasn’t going to get the job, and he walked out of the room.”

Posner, however, says nothing’s been decided. He says he’s always thought the company would be better off with independent funding. “All along, the understanding was that I was probably going to do it myself anyway,” he says.
It’s a good idea, considering that the Unix market is becoming jammed with Sun/AT&T’s converged Unix, Apple’s A/UX, Next’s Mach/Unix — and the wild card, the IBM-backed Open Systems Foundation.

WHY WORK? I ask myself that every day, but it looks like others are begging the question, too. There’s a whole series of articles in the July/August 1988 issue of Utne Reader exploring America’s out-of-control work ethic. It’s good reading, especially for those whose careers are based in high tech and who are paddling furiously just trying to keep their heads above the trade magazines.

The articles are excerpted from various publications, and represent a variety of points of view: “When work becomes an obsession,” “Feeling overworked? Here’s why,” “The joy of work,” “Should you quit your job?” — you get the idea.

History on how we’ve turned into such a nation of workaholics is fascinating, and sometimes troubling. Did you know that people believe their work hours have risen 20 percent since 1973, according to a recent Harris Poll, but feel their leisure time has plummeted 32 percent — despite no change in the “official” government work week?

Hmmmm… that must mean something.

Here’s a quote from “Farewell to work”: “What this nation needs is not the work ethic, but a JOB ethic. If a job needs doing — highways repaired, babies changed, fields plowed — let’s get it done. Otherwise, take five.” Amen.

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