Wayne Wilson: the Australian Who Invented Concurrency
from the September 1984 issue of Australian Personal Computer magazine
Wayne Wilson, of Blacktown ts a little-known Australian hi-tech hero. He invented the concurrency concept that Australians now buy back from Microsoft and Digital Research. “We also had multi-user before Digital Research, and were the first to offer CP/M windowing" claims Wilson, and his partner, Roger Jones, who were also first to offer 8 and 16 bit running together. You’d think the world would beat a path to the door of AED (Acoustic Electronic Developments) unfashionably-located Blacktown Sydney factory door.
But software developments are not panentable. Once an idea is out, it’s open slather in the rush to commercial production. AED missed out because they didn’t have the marketing power. At the time of the development of the concurrency concept, Wayne Wilson had talked over the concept with Morrow of California.
Incestuous relationships in Sunnyvale, California moved the AED concurrency idea swiftly through the system; “We believe Digital Research was very much influenced by our work, because Morrow are very close to Digital Research” says Wilson.
“If we had had the money, the world would have had concurrency two years earlier" says Wilson sadly. “Now”, he says, “when we have a new idea, we want to make a dollar out of it”.
But Wilson and Jones have no hard feelings. “If Edison hadn’t existed, some-one would have invented the gramophone eventually”. Of the two, the animated Wilson is the inventor, and the fast talker. Partner, Roger Jones is also an engineer, but applies his particular genius to the details of finance, and the “can it be done, will it sell, and for how much" questions.
The concurrency development research cost Jones and Wilson $180,000. “It probably paid us back $60,OOO. But now it’s a world standard. We didn’t make any money on it, but It has raised AED’s esteem.”
Jones and Wilson hold that the law of creative design is “the amount of creativity in any given design is directly proportional to the number of engineers grovelling around the floor with a rats nest of paper and an oscilloscope’.
“Out at Blacktown, there’s a fair amount of grovelling among the test results right now as AED works on new things. They won’t say what new things, because they have learned a hard lesson. This time, they plan to bring their ideas to fully marketable reality before they break it to the world. They are applying their ingenuity and creativity to a mysterious operating system project undoubtedly related to their planned June 1985 release of their UNIX system on the Intel 8286, and their high-speed file I/O. This latter device, will, they claim dramatically improve the disk to I/O transfer by a multiple of 4.
Jones sees the possibility that the AED file I/O will have an impact on the US market. But the situation remains volatile, “Things depend onthe US mood at the time, and our agreements with Macrotech and Gifford” says Jones.
Their R&D work promises products that anyone anywhere might be interested. So much that Jones and Wilson are a little worried about industrial espionage. They are about to regularly check their R&D rural hideouts for bugs, and check visitors for microphones. “Your heart goes out to IBM", says Wilson, in an unusual flash of inter-corporate sympathy. “Those guys must have a terrible hassle, trying to keep secrets from AT&T.
Wilson started off as a technician with STC working in communications and industrial control, and worked in London, and Indonesia and the US. At 20, he decided to try a few ideas on his own. He developed an acoustic measuring instrument for ATN.7 which measured reverberation constants in a sound room.
He didn’t sell too many of these. Then he came up with his first hot product; a tourist coach sound system, simple to repair and portable between coaches. Wilson sold 15. Then he moved onto machine control, starting with a plastics extrusion control system for Scobel Australia. He began to manufacture, using imported parts from the US.
Engineer, Roger Jones joined AED in 1979. “Roger could see that I was a bit of a dreamer — an ideas person — always looking for ways to make a better mousetrap" , says Wilson.
“True, replies Roger Jones. “He comes up with the ideas, and I say whether it can be done". Sometimes Jones decides that it can’t be done, and the world doesn’t need Wilson’s better mousetraps. When this happens, sometimes Wayne Wilson disagrees “When someone says it can’t be done — I get mad. I try to show that it can. But if Roger can see that I have a total commitment, then he says ‘Go ahead’. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t.
“For example with MPS (Multi-program Selection), if I’d taken the first knock-back, we wouldn’t have it now.”
Looking at the microcomputer market he notes that in the 70’s and early 80’s machines were all made by small producers. But now, he says, you have to get big, market successfully, and have a brilliant machine as well.
Jones and Wilson like to think they are a small company with a brilliant machine, which ts working very hard on cranking up their marketing. Their Universe “supercomputer" is described as the computer that computer people buy. AED extends their competitive technical edge to their one year warranty, service, and system design. “We tried to make it as reliable as possible, and as modular as possible".
All the functions of the AED Universe are on separate cards. The power units and the drives are also replaceable. Access to the system is by keylock, and cards can be changed in minutes. AED quotes an onsite 30 minute repair time. The meantine between failures Is two to two and a half years.
AED claim to offer a competitive price on their systems because they manufacture memory cards tn Australla.
AED now sells two Supercomputers a week, and expects that figure to rise to four per week by Christmas. The average purchaser spends $20,000. “Today purchasers want more and more. They want mini systems at a micro price", says Wilson, of AED‘s design considerations.
“The marked demand is for reliability, service support and speed — and now they want multi-user capacity as well, and they want to keep that speed, even within the multi-user field”, notes Jones.
“People also want something that is easy to use. Corporations want fully integrated computing databases, and high speed at a low cost’. Jones illustrates the insatiability of the demands; “As soon as we offered six terminals, people wanted 10, then they wanted 32".
Jones and Wilson says that by the end of 1985, they will deliver what the market wants; a mini-system at a micro price.
AED current offerings (which are regularly upgraded) include single and multi-user systems (up to 32 users) based on the Intel family of processors (8085, 8088, 8086, and 80286).
These systems run Digital Research’s operating systems including CP/M, CP/M plus, CP/M-86, Concurrent CP/M-86 and MP/M-86. 8 bit compatibility has been added to concurrent CP/M-86 and MP/M-86. This is endorsed by Digital Research. The systems are called Concurrent CP/M 8-16 PLUS, and Concurrent MP/M 8-16 PLUS. Hard disk are offered ranging from 16 to 600 megabytes. Single user systems are available based on the Zilog Z80 processor.
All systems are based on the 696/100 bus and provide an 8” disk drive, with standard commercial software as available for CP/M 2.2 and CP/M-86, from such suppliers as Digital Research, Ashton Tate and Sorcim.
Powerful CAD graphics are offered at a claimed 50% price benefit reduction on comparable systems. AED’s Concurrent MP/M 8-16 offers telecommunications, modem support, electronic mail, timestamping encrypted passwords, Telex and numerous features extra to the Compupro MP/M version.
Average value of system purchase is $20,O00. Customers may buy terminals and printers separately, or as supplied by AED to their particular needs.
AED are looking at doing their own terminals. When they do this, they will offer high resolution as a standard, and will offer 10 pages of concurrency; four concurrent, and six ‘MPS-ible’. Wilson explains: “In MPS you can jump arounda number of frozen tasks. It needs disk drive storage, but no memory. This gives you 10 pages, but you can’t run them together at the same time".
“Concurrency lets you move from task to task. You can have them all running at the same time, and you need memory for each task”.
AED want to stay with the new ideas. They cite their connections with the US computer companies Digital Research, Morrow, Compupro, and Gifford as one way they keep up with the play.
Gifford, for example, are working on an operating system for Compupro based on Digital Research’s OS. Jones notes that AED is one of three companies in the world beside Gifford that has the source code for Digital Research’s multi-user operating system.
“We have an agreement with Gifford, so that the wheels don’t get re-invented. We have swap meets, telephone calls and disk exchange” says Jones.
“Looking at the industry, AED predict that DEC, AT&T and IBM will all release multi-user systems before Christmas. UNIX, they say will become the world’s multi-user Operating system standard.
The 8286 will take over, because already DEC, IBM and AT&T have made the choice, they predict. The 286 is the processor for the near future, they say. There will be a death in the MS-DOS software available. You’ll buy UNIX instead and the MS-DOS shell and the CP/M shell and the CP/M-86 shell. Microsoft and Digital Research are already writing to this end, says Jones.
“The whole industry is turning around. We started with CP/M, everything ran on CP/M. Then IBM confused the issue by using MS-DOS. But standardisation is coming back in via UNIX and the shells which emulate the other operating systems, he says.
You can smell the loyalty to Digital Research out at AED. They like the high-toned “by-engineers-for engineers” mood of the California CP/M company. They don’t go for MS-DOS at all, although users can have it on the Universe. “What’s wrong with MS-DOS?”
According to Jones: “With MS-DOS you can’t call console status. This means if you have a program on the screen running through a listing — you can’t have a freeze or an interrupt. To do it, you’d have to press the space bar continuously”, he complains “WordStar, for example, has to poll the system all the time — it has to make a direct call to the hardware.”
“People say ‘I want to have MS-DOS’. Why? ‘Because I want to be IBM-compatible’. But MS-DOS is so poor it needs hardware hooks”, says Jones. “What’s going to happen is that soon well all be using UNIX with MS-DOS and CP/M 86 shells IBM has endorsed a UNIX for the IBM PC, and Xenix V.4 will be delivered by Christmas. Digital Research already have a UNIX shell for Concurrent DOS”.
Jones expands on his theme: “MS-DOS is a quick and nasty operating system. It makes too many outside calls to hardware. Many of the programs you buy for MS-DOS have to have an IBM PC to run. “But this doesn’t happen on CP/M-86. There are lots of calls the software writer can get at’, says Jones.
“In two years time, you won’t hear the word MS-DOS", he predicts “You’ll hear UNIX. Memories will be cheap. You’ll have Operating systems under operating systems".
Jones and Wilson anticipate that soon mini-computers will disappear, “Minis will be absorbed by the more powerful, lower priced micros", they say. He predicts an animal which will be a sub-mini-super-micro with extremely high speed for both CPU and disk, and obsolescence immunity.
In design terms, this matches AEDs own aspirations. In four years no Universe customer has traded in or dumped any system — they just up grade, report AED.
Wilson and Jones find financing growth a problem. There are risks involved, they say, and not every financler knows enough about the technologies to feel the confidence to finance.
Jones sees two paths for AED tn their growth. The first option — go up at an incredible rush. New models, new ideas, and a raft of capital. The second choice he sees as the sideways action; “Just make the machine you made last month, and don’t do any overheads in R & D”.
In the future, Wilson suspects that the quantity of innovation from AED may diminish. In the early days, he says, “we were firing ahead of the pack. Then we wouldn’t offer anything less than the best’. Today, Jones notes, the differences are smaller. Its harder now to retain a margin.” You have to work 80% harder to be 10% better”.
Resting from working 80% harder, there are other things to life beside computers, for Jones and Wilson. Jones likes trains. “You have to have a hobby, or you go around the twist”, he says. Jones makes 5” gauge 1/10 scale trains that haul 1.5 tons. His next modei will be computer controlled.
Wayne Wilson turns to music, and the piano. He has a Kawai half-grown grand at home. His choice of music matches the business situation; when hes got cash-flow problems, he’ll go home and brood over the keyboard with “The Eroica, the Funeral March", he jokes. When thing are looking up it’s “Handel”.