Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Protel

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. Mackensen (talk) 04:03, 2 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Protel

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Does not appear notable, unable to find in-depth coverage in multiple reliable sources No unique names 22:12, 17 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Delete per nom and WP is not a repository of technical info of this nature. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 22:34, 17 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Delete I was unable to find many other references, in part because Protel is apparently a popular name for products and companies. The one reference in the article cites one other paper,

Foxall, D.G., Joliat, M.J., Kamel, R.F., Miceli, J.J., "PROTEL: A High Level Language for Telephony", Proc. 3rd Intl. Computer Software & Applications Conf. (November 1979), pp. 193-197.

and the ACM digital library claims only three other papers cited the article reference; none of these seem to be about the Protel language. There is a blog that gives a good description of the language but can't be used as a reliable source. There seem to be some companies that support Protel in Nortel systems. But unless there are reliable sources that never made to the web or JSTOR, two possibly peer-reviewed papers and a blog fall short of notability guidelines. Mark viking (talk) 22:53, 17 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Computing-related deletion discussions. — Frankie (talk) 22:12, 18 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Do not Delete This was the proprietary language of a major telephony manufacturer (Nortel), with tens of millions of lines of code. In the mid 1980s, systems written in Protel were among the largest working computing systems in the entire world. (Back then, even just 100,000 line systems were considered extremely large at that time, and 1 million line systems were often doomed to fail.) Despite the size of the systems, features of the language enabled the telephone switches written in it to be extremely reliable. Entire (hard cover, 1 to 2" thick, but proprietary) textbooks were written on these systems, with larger print runs than some academic textbooks.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the University of Toronto offered a Masters level Network Engineering course, which referenced Protel in class materials.
Protel's genesis predates the web, and thus articles mentioning it will likely be print-only, with a few exceptions for conference proceedings put up on the web, after the fact, or the odd mentions in people's blogs.

Just because a computing language is older than the web -- and thus hard to find on the web -- does not make it "not notable". 173.206.176.12 (talk) 20:53, 22 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
With just a little bit of hunting, I found a headhunter ad (from the year 2000, when Nortel was still hiring), looking for PROTEL skills. "InfoWorld - Google Books". books.google.ca. 2012 [last update]. Retrieved 22 December 2012. 173.206.176.12 (talk) 21:18, 22 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Canada-related deletion discussions. Ottawahitech (talk) 06:12, 24 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, MBisanz ^talk 06:27, 25 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Comment - [1] I found this, but someone with access to the 4 pages in the book (or whatever it is) will be needed for this to be of more use. I would strongly expect this to be notable, the problem is finding sources that are reliable, as it was long dead by the widespread appearance of the internet. I'm fairly sure the article should be named PROTEL, not Protel. Lukeno94 (talk) 10:35, 25 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. I empathise that references are harder to find since this product was pre-internet. However wikipedia relies on articles to be WP:VERIFIABLE. 1292simon (talk) 11:23, 25 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Keep As an essentially dead proprietary language, finding references covering this topic in detail is going to be challenging but the fact remains that this was a major programming language. Nortel's switching equipment was and is used around the world and nearly all their product line was based in various forms of PROTEL. Mention ICSE papers, being the sole subject of IEEE COMPSAC 79 paper as well as some coverage in books is sufficient to demonstrate notability here. RadioFan (talk) 19:35, 25 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting. The article currently just describes what PROTEL is, not why it matters. If it was explained how widely it was used, then that would be a huge improvement. 1292simon (talk) 21:23, 25 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed, the article definitely needs improvement.--RadioFan (talk) 22:08, 25 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Keep per RadioFan. This was a notable heavily used language. But yes the article does need some clean up. -DJSasso (talk) 13:01, 27 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.