Innovations
Beyond the many technical innovations in the MCP design, the Burroughs Large Systems had many management innovations now being used by the internet community at large. The system software were shipped to customers inclusive of source code and all the editing and compilation tools to regenerate new versions of MCP to customers. Many customers developed niche expertise on the inner workings of the MCP, and customers often sent in the 'patches' (fragment pieces of source code with sequence numbers) as suggestions of new enhanced features or fault corrections (FTR - field trouble reports). Many of the suggested patches were included by the systems developers and integrated into the next version of the MCP release. Including a community of voluntary self-professed experts into mainstream technical work is now practiced by everyone and is the essence of Open Innovation. One can almost consider the MCP source code as one of the early instances of a source code wiki, where many collaborators integrated their works with versioning and history controls. This management innovation of community development dated back to the '70s.
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Famous quotes containing the word innovations:
“By such innovations are languages enriched, when the words are adopted by the multitude, and naturalized by custom.”
—Miguel De Cervantes (1547–1616)
“Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)