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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?"
I gave up trying to read what promised (I'd thought) to be an interesting article. Guess I fell for the hook. Guess I haven't been to the CIO web site for a while. Guess I didn't remember the signal to noise ration for their pages (about 10dB). Guess I'll not finish their article. Guess which web site I'm never going back to.
The meat of their article is spread across at least 19 pages, each page of which contains probably less than 100 words text. WTH? Each page of which contains 2K lines, and about 100K of text (this obviously doesn't incorporate the image load and javascript execution tax you pay for each newly loaded page). I gave up even trying to finish the article after seven pages of waiting on a semi-slow connection.
Guess I'll wait for the readers' reviews.
Each day the internet gets a little less interesting, a little less fun. I fully anticipate the day web pages are 100% ads, nothing else (we're close!).
Borland, DEC and Amiga are the ones that really stand out for me.
I remember opening up the giant box of Borland C++ v3 floppy disks and wondering what the hell I got myself into. I still have the box, except the floppies were imaged onto CDs. A well-done, not-perfect product. Borland was very helpful whenever I had questions.
The DEC Alpha was a great CPU. I remembering running across one at an auction, and picking it up, running home and dropping NT 3.51 on it. Solid design, built like a tank. DEC made some interesting innovative products (and yes, they did make the DEC Rainbow, which my college standardized on for, oh, about six months before it died a quick death).
The best on the list is the Amiga. One exceptional system, designed from the ground up as a top-notch computing, video and music machine. I still have a 2000HD with a Toaster, a couple of 500s, a 1000 and a 3000. There are some tasks that PCs can't touch the Amiga, even years later. Several Spanish TV stations in South America use Amigas as their main titling platform. An Amiga with Lightwave and a toaster is a formidable video production studio, even to this day. Too bad Commodore was such a poorly-run company, they did all they could to kill the Ami. At least some Euro folks have kept up with the platform, porting Linux and developing new stuff.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
Sega Dreamcast, anyone?
Thank the Sony PR machine for that one, folks.
The Amiga was actually the direct descendent of the Atari 400/800 - it was a 16 bit Motorola 68000 system with graphics a lot of PCs still don't have today. Jay Miner was the genius behind the hardware, Dale Luck and Jim McRazz did the bulk of the OS. I can't remember why it didn't stay in Atari but it didn't. They trie to go it alone for a while then Commodore picked them up.
If you look at comp.sys.amiga in the day complaints about hos Commodore was screwing it up were commonplace.
In fact there was one version of the bootstrap code that is you held down certain keys while it was booting it said something like "We built it, they fucked it up"
The Amiga was so cool it hurt.
Need Mercedes parts ?
"And much as it pains some, IE4 was a far superior browser to NS4. "
NS4 *eventually* was fine, but it took a long time to get there.
But really, the height of the browser wars was the 3 version of both, and in that regard, Netscape blew away IE3. And in terms of long-term survival, Netscape had the right idea (groupware), they just took long to get there. Note that Google is trying a similar path; they're just being careful how they engage MS, always doing it on their terms, not MS. For this reason alone, it's clear Google is run by brighter management than Netscape.
Don't forget, IE4 was combined in a way to put a lot of "push" access (that was big at the time) so that the active desktop would simply team with advertisements for Disney and a few other companies. It slowed the PC down so as to be useless so people turned it off. The concept was correct; it just came out about 8 years too early and was proprietary (RSS anyone?). If you fire up Windows 98 (the original) in VMWare, unfortunately the effect is gone because the companies who provided the push content no longer do it.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I do remember that era very well, but the desktop PC was the harbinger of things to come. I remember well the VAX, the PDP series, they were the reference through the late 70's and early 80's. But the PC was a signal that pure processing power was not going to be enough to distinguish yourself from the pack. The PC epitomized the idea that a single hardware standard could be a powerful driver for software innovation. Companies like Sun, Apple, and IBM "got it" and they prospered. But DEC saw the idea, and it scared Ken so much that he campaigned against small PC's. His vision was a mini computer and you would "share time". He didn't "get it".
DEC had a lot of great ideas and great technology, but I always felt that at a certain point they forgot what made their hardware and software a standard, and they ignored the reality that the landscape changed around them. Despite overwhelming evidence all around them.
That's why I said DEC went out of their way to fail.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you