Dearly Departed — Companies and Products That Didn't Make It

Esther Schindler writes "Some products just didn't deserve to die. But they did, because the companies made bad business decisions. Dearly Departed, revisits several favorites — from minicomputers to software utilities — and mourns the best and brightest that died an untimely death. What companies or products would you add? Which of them deserved to go?"

Comments

quick summary

[call -151]

Quick list for those who don't care to click through one per page for 19 pages:

DEC, Tandem, Apollo, Borland, Amiga, Commodore, Ashton-Tate, Fox, Central Point Software, Quarterdeck, Gould, Infocom, Sequent, Poquet,
Taligent, Word Perfect, Lotus, and Compuserve are the "dearly departed"

I can't comment much on the PC-heavy end of the list, but DEC stands out to me as the one
which least deserved to die. DEC Western Research Lab was a fantastic place with a great deal of innovation and freedom, and
watching it shrivel and die was painful.

Re:quick summary

[ink]

No, they bought it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga

Re:quick summary

[frdmfghtr]

Or try reading the printable version.

Re:quick summary

[Attila Dimedici]

It is still somewhat of a stretch to say that Commodore buying Amiga led to its demise, since while the Amiga Corporation developed the Amiga, they never brought it to market. As that Wikipedia article you linked stated, the first model came out after Commodore bought the company.

Re:quick summary

[Kenshin]

Send my love to WordPerfect 14, wherever she is!

Ottawa.

Re:quick summary

[tdknox]

No. Commodore didn't create the Amiga. The original Amiga was created by a small group of people, and Atari attempted to screw them out of the technology. After a weird and bitter struggle, Commodore purchased Amiga. Read the full story here. It's an interesting article.

Re:quick summary

[GreggBz]

The inability to upgrade the graphics (due to the video memory and bus timings that had to fit with NTSC timings) was one of the reasons for people perceiving the Amiga as a niche machine (games and video) back then and had no little influence in its ultimate demise.

I see this a lot and I think it's a common misconception. Very early, stuff was not to expandable.
Integrated hardware was common during that era. It was cheaper and made the system tight and fast. All those chips were engineered to prevent bottle-necks. Even still, the Amiga was more modular then a lot of its counterparts (Macintosh and Atari I'm looking at you)

Further, had the chipset not been set to run on NTSC (or PAL) timings, a huge portion of the Amiga application would have never existed.

Later, you had plenty of options, much like the PC market. Maybe no one knew that, because everyone bought a cheap A500, but that's the fault of marketing.. I'll mention that latter.

The big box Amigas were highly expandable, featuring 16/32 bit ZORRO-II, III and ISA slots. You had options for putting graphics expansions into a dedicated video slot also. Later, you could expand the video via the Zorro slots, but a problem was developing retargateble graphics drivers. This was addressed and you saw all kinds of 16 and 24 bit RTG graphics cards. People preferred keeping with the chipset timings, mostly, because it was totally cool to have it work with very expensive television equipment, but there were certainly options for other applications. By the time VGA rolled around, you had all kinds of options.

If you read some about David Haynie (The designer of the Amiga 3000) you'd know that the developers and hardware engineers were all very smart and in tune with the industry. In fact, they embraced the PCI bus for the next generation Amigas. Of course Commodore did not often listen to its Engineers and funding for R&D was pitiful in the later years.

The Amiga's demise was thanks to the greedy morons that ran Commodore. The technology was still expandable and viable even later in its life. Read this sometime. No architectural or software limitation led directly to its end.

Re:quick summary

[rs79]

"Forgive me, but just about every PC with VGA or better had better graphics than the Amiga 1000"

In the day, that is when the Amiga first came out, your PC graphics choices were CGA or the then brand new EGA that gave you 16 colors.

IBM did have a PGC ("Professional graphics controller") that would do 640x480 by 24 but. It was $2500 and was two cards. I saw exactly one in the wild.

It was a few years before VGA came out. In the day the Amiga was the best bang for your graphics buck. Never mind the ability to sync to NTSC explained elsewhere here. And the first VGA's were no screaming hell. It took PC's a number of years to catch up.

To this day no computer can pull a window from background to foreground as fast at the Amiga could then.

PROTIP: How to avoid 20 pages of click-through ads

[brouski]

Find the "Printable Version" button on the first page. Condenses everything into one page.

Most of these "news" sites have one.

DEC did their best to fail

[tkrotchko]

When Ken Olsen made his famous comment in 1977, it set the tone for DEC to ensure it quickly lost relevance in the computer world. And when DEC did finally come out with PC's, they were proprietary at a time when the proprietary designs were slowly losing out to the IBM PC.

By the time the Alpha chip was released, the company was already doing very poorly. By the time Robert Palmer took over, it was not clear to anyone at the time that DEC would ever again be relevant. I don't know if he was the right man for the job or not, but he basically started parceling out bits of DEC to whoever would buy it. My experience is you can't cut your way to profitability, and when Compaq bought DEC, it was never clear to anyone why they would be interested. I believe DEC took out Compaq on it's way to the bottom.

I find it amusing now that Ken Olsen tries to claim that he was not anti-PC. My personal opinion was the Ken Olsen was anti-PC because it was pretty clear that cheap boxes would soon be as powerful as the "minis" that DEC had for sale. He knew he'd eventually be squeezed from the bottom end by PC's and there was no place to grow on the top end.

My only reminder of DEC is a copy of Digital Unix with all the manuals in the original box that I keep on a top shelf to remind me of what DEC used to be. Personally, I'm not surprised that DEC failed, I'm more surprised how little time it took they basically went from being the #2 computer maker to irrelevance in 5 years and then they were gone 5 years later.

Re:DEC did their best to fail

[Frumious Wombat]

Ever use a DecPro? Built like tanks, wysiwyg editor with integratable charts and graphics, based on a micro-PDP processor (16-bit flat address space in 1980). Then, some nimrod decided to keep the user locked in this DEC-marketroid approved environment, and that they shouldn't be able to format their own floppies, because DEC would make more money selling pre-formatted ones. They could have just run RSX-11 or RT-11 on it, used the PDP compilers, and instantly had a large installed base with developers everywhere. Instead we got a hacked-together 8-bit processor running a copy of CP/M, and were stuck with that architecture for the next decade and change.

With some vision, they could have been the dominant PC player and become the standard, as they already had a built-in upgrade path, and a decent installed software base. PDP-11 -> VAX -> Alpha Instead, they listened to Ken, marketed wierd machines (still built like tanks) too late (DEC Rainbows), then tried to become a PC company.