Industrial Secrecy

The story that I heard about the mysterious similarity between the programs at both Menasco and Dowty was a simple one really and it was to do with personnel moving from one place to another, I know who it was, but as this is a blog, on the world wide web, I will keep the name to myself, mainly because some will argue the toss about which came first.

The chicken, or the egg.

The majority of the programs I am speaking about originated at Menasco, which of course, does not mean that the programs or the code originated or was proprietary to Menasco. It just means that a bunch of programming code that ended up at Dowty had been taken there by a former Menasco employee.

This was nothing new as the practice was rife in the industry, as I mentioned, McDonnell Douglas was fairly open about methods with their trusted customers, they also shared the same with their subcontractors. As multiple subcontractors may have been in competition with each other, it was the subcontractors, like Heroux, Dowty and Menasco, who started coveting each others methods.

It became quite common for employees who were leaving for the competition or had been given their marching orders to be escorted from buildings by the security officers, in later years, access to the computer systems would be removed before the unfortunate employee even knew.

I think the atmosphere of mistrust developed from those senior men that came before all of us, at the end of the day, the coveting of the likes of a lug analysis based on theories from Melcon and Hoblit developed thirty years earlier could hardly have been an excuse to vilify anyone.

Yet, at some point in the future, an event would happen based on the origins of these programs that would amaze and astonish me.

Something that would affect more than my own destiny.