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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?"
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.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Seems to be primarily concerned wtih acquisitions that caused the death of companies. What about the acquisition and death of Netscape? I don't think it deserved to die and it was pretty much decided in multiple settlements that Microsoft's bundling of IE with Windows destroyed any chance Netscape had.
I've personally never used their old products but, you know, I do use Mozilla and it's derivatives and it's a fine browser. Unfortunate they didn't have a snowflake's chance in hell with Microsoft's actions.
My work here is dung.
That's easy: Webvan.
I loved Webvan. My friends loved Webvan. To this day, I think it was one of the best ideas to come out of the dot-com era, even though it was one of the first companies to go under when the bubble burst.
It is such a shame that they're gone, and the day I heard they were closing up shop (or technically, warehouse, I suppose) was a sad day indeed. Going to the grocery store is such a hassle, and I gladly paid the premium for the convenience.
I still think that the idea is valid, and if it were done right, would be a multibillion-dollar industry. Whoever takes up the cause now, though, would have to fight not only the trials and tribulations of starting a new business, but the legacy of the spectacular failure of Webvan before it.
What a shame. I can't believe that it's been six years since their demise.
Avoids the 19-page ad-laden version:
http://www.cio.com/article/print/125263
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
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!).
spread across 19 pages DESERVES TO DIE!!!
They died because they knew what the customer needed. NOT what the customer actually wanted, but what they thought the customer should have. DEC was a bunch of business dumb asses run by arrogant engineers who thought that they knew better. Period.
The rest died because their business was not viable - for what ever reason. Period.
Sorry, but Microsoft and Apple are still here because they have viable businesses.
'NUFF said.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
TFA is organized into 19 pages that have a small summary on each page. Let me reach into my wordbag and pull out something to describe that. Let's see..."annoying," yeah that works.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
The old Divx video player is one major example of a product that deserved to die off in the marketplace. Moreover, it certainly deserved to have its name taken by a popular video encoding format. And made into a bit character in a penny arcade.
Ryan Fenton
I'm not going to 19 bloody pages to see this throw away article about a little nostalgia.
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
people voted with their money!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I'd like to point out that in this list, there was exactly one company "killed" by Microsoft. Foxpro was acquired by them. More importantly MS is still keeping the project alive after all of this time. Microsoft most certainly is not the company killer that the Slashdot Groupthink make it out to be.
I don't respond to AC's.
Sega Dreamcast, anyone?
Thank the Sony PR machine for that one, folks.
as i have learned from reading slashdot, dilbert, and hanging out in the 'linux community', all non-tech staff at a corporation are useless dead weight, hangers on with dragging knuckles and pea sized brains. if only they could be eliminated, society would become a technological utopia. marketing, sales, management, HR, and so forth, are all worthless wastes of time.
and yet, here you come, now telling me that marketing, sales, and management are somehow 'important' and should be payed 'attention to'?
hogwash. we all know that the perfect corporation would make products that we give away for free, have no management, HR, marketing, sales, or customer service staff, and uhm. yeah. we could all live off our wives or in our parents basement.
i for one, will never abandon the True Software view of reality.
Find the "Printable Version" button on the first page. Condenses everything into one page.
Most of these "news" sites have one.
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
Amiga
Philadelphia Phillies
Curling in the US
Proper grammar any more
Frosty Paws for dogs
Fried food as a food group
Dvorak as a writer
the Pet Rock
any Stehpen King movie adaption
Babylon 5's 5th season
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Fast, light-weight, and a deliciously easy-to-program API. It would boot on a K6 II in less time that common OSes boot on modern hardware and remained incredibly responsive, even when the processors were maxed. File system with integrated metadata allowing searching. Devices were also managed in a nifty way. It also had support for 8 processors in a day when multi-processor machines were a rarity. The little tabs that could be moved across the top of the window.
Cause of Death: Could be blamed on Microsoft and their secret OEM bootloader licence and the DoJ not wanting to include that part in the anti-trust case. (If an OEM shipped a computer with a Microsoft OS, they had to use a Microsoft bootloader. In those days, MS didn't play well with other OSes.) Eventually ran out of money and sold to Palm for a few cents a share.
Rebirth: Haiku-OS is a binary compatible open source version. Rumors of Apple replacing the Mach kernel with a lighter-weight kernel could see the same performance again in 10.6 or 10.7.
I have two car related additions that relate to the same nameplate.
First, the MN12 based 1989-1997 Ford Thunderbird. GM managed to keep the larger two door coupe alive, and I see no reason why Ford couldn't have waited a few years on limited production with some minor refreshes to see if sales picked up. I think the real reason was that Ford management hated the car from the beginning, because even though it won Motortrend's car of the year when it was introduced, the team was heavily criticized internally, and I think the program director was fired, because the car was somewhat over-cost and over-weight. Personally, with some refreshes, particularly the upgrades to the Essex engine that came with the 1999 Mustang, or a Duratec 3.0, the car could have been a salvaged, if Ford had just waited a year or two extra.
Second, the 2002-2005 Thunderbird. With a better engine, a lower price, and maybe a V6 version, it could have been a hit. But it was a project of a previous version of Ford management, and it might compete with the Mustang in a V6, so when Ford's own mistake led to higher prices (due to initial demand) which then destroyed sales, Ford just killed it.
division?
sigfault. core dumped.
They also spent a lot of money/time porting WordPerfecct to OS/2, using a Windows extension library (can't remember the name), and all they got was a buggy slow implementation. Then MS killed off OS/2 through Windows/hardware licencing.
So basically WordPerfect Corp pissed away a lot of money when they left their core business.
Then Novell bought them out. Novell stripped out GroupWise, dropped the rest of the junk, and sold WordPerfect to Corel.
IMHO WordPerfect is STILL the best word processor available. And I have used Word, WordPro, OpenOffice, PeachTree, WordStar, and a few others. Not just try them out. I actually produced large documents with them.
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
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Acquisition by Symantec killed Central Point Software. The DMCA buried it.
They made Copy ][ Plus for the Apple II series and other similarly named software for other platforms. C2+ was the essential piece of software at my high school, for students and teachers alike, back when copy protection itself was an art form (double spiral tracks on 5.25" floppies), not like the typical, "If this block on the disk is readable, refuse to run," protections of later years. (However, 8.2 was much better than 9.0. For some reason the UI became sluggish.)
Nowadays, such software is completely illegal under the DMCA.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Be, Inc. really epitomizes this for me. They had great ideas and great products, but their dull business moves caused them to die an ugly death.
They did have an uphill struggle - nobody's going to port their major software to a platform without a userbase, but a platform isn't going to get a userbase until it has major software ported to it. Being a late entry to the PC game put them in that chicken/egg scenario and really hurt them.
But surely they could have somehow convinced SOMEONE to port an application to BeOS. They should have poured everything they had into this. Offer Adobe a small percentage of hardware sales if they port Photoshop, for example. Get Corel to bring WordPerfect into the mix so you have a big-name competitor offering a word processor.
Instead they killed the BeBox and from there it was a downward spiral.
Sigh.
Windows Vista. We hardly knew ye, and for that, we are thankful.
Company: Slashdot
Born: 1841
Died: 2007 (purchased by Microsoft)
Cause of Death: After Taco's death, his 6 year-old nephew took over the site. Most of the articles were about farts and dodgeball. Popularity went through the roof, but the kid forgot to renew the domain. Microsoft bought it and turned it into a site where people could post tributes to Windows Genuine Advantage.
Founder: Taco Bell
Most well-known product(s): Ascii art
Why we miss them: Because Digg was just bought by the Microsofties
Lasting image/quote: "Repost"
Some settling may occur during posting.
Deserves have nothing to do with real life.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Who now owns WordPerfect 5.1 ?
I believe that was the best Word Perfect. Rumours have it that it was the last WP written in all assembly.
It was made to run on Unix, SCO specifically. With the SCO emulation kernel modules, you can make it run on linux, if you can find a copy.
I believe that if WordPerfect 5.1 for Linux were to be made available for something less than $20, perhapes download only or a mail-order CD, it would sell well enough to justify the trouble.
Their demise remains a sore spot for me. What would Macs be running now if Apple had acquired Be? (Not that OSX is so bad.) On a more financially painful note, I lost what should have been a small fortune when they folded. Palm further squandered the technology after buying the IP at, I believe, about $90M. If only someone had opened the source...
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
Atari... Killed by.... ET not really but funny enough ;-)
Few companies since the dawn of the microcomputer have so thoroughly blown a sure thing. Heck, they called it The Osborne Effect for a reason...
A clever person solves a problem, A wise person avoids it. -Einstein
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.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Netscape absolutely deserved to die. It is the ABSOLUTE postchild for how not to manage a software group.
The basic management philosophy was that anyone could modify anything at any time for any reason. Nobody owned anything. Did you ever wonder why the actual source code release was over 70MB(!) back in the mid-90's, and wouldn't compile?
While that approach might work when you have a very small crew (under 10), it just doesn't scale. I know one guy who went in as a contractor and he couldn't get his work done because everybody was changing things to meet their own personal project needs, without thinking about a clean way of doing it. He finally had to get his manager to agree to announce that anyone who touched a certain section would be fired if they modified that code until he got his stuff done.
What's sad is that I ran into one of their top managers later on at Agami. Within a year, that guy had destroyed what had been a top engineering group of very talented people, and within 18 months he was canned. Agami has never recovered. A pity, as they used to be Kliener-Perkins' hottest startup (according to KP).
So I would agree that Netscape deserved better. Far, far, better. They didn't deserve their bad management. But with it, they did indeed deserve to die.
Thank $DIETY that they open-sourced it. In many ways, Netscape is a classic example of the extremes of both good and bad.
If it was assembler, they must have had a hell of a make file.
The DOS version (well the early ones) ran on almost ANY DOS implementation. I had a copy which ran on Z-DOS (Zenith DOS for the H-100).
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I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
When was Dvorak an actual writer? I first noticed him 25 years ago, and he was a nonsequitarian flamebaiter even then.
But their cars are shit. The trucks are OK.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It dies and dies, but it people keep Frankensteining it.
r -has-arrived.html .
t -moments-in-dotcom-history-digiscents/ . It belatedly made PC World's Worst 25 Tech Products Of All Time http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,125772-page,8/ar ticle.html
The history of odor-enhanced experience is outlined at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smell-o-vision
True to dot.com refuse-to-learn-from-history hubris, one company (TriSenx) is planning to release a stinking computer peripheral, priced variously according to different sources as $269 to $369 US. One source claims it's available now http://www.buzzle.com/articles/day-smelly-compute
Another (DigiScents) has been making claims they will do so for at least 7 years http://www.chaddickerson.com/blog/2006/05/26/grea
It was supposed to be a joke when it was in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. It still is. Unfortunately an iSmell may eventually exist. Start petitioning now for the killing of a cubicle mate for using one of these to be considered self-defense.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Not to be pedantic, but "proper grammar any more" is horrible grammar. "Any more" should be the one word phrase "anymore." The rest of your list presumes that the items no longer exist, so it's redundant. Unless there is a joke (you were rated +3, Funny) that I'm not getting.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The rumour going was that compaq america on aquisitions was that the cfo wanted a better sap accounts package than they could on compaq stuff (i kid you not).
Complete rumour but sounded reasonable in Compaq circles
Powwow chat by Tribal Voice is one app that died (was killed) way before its time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program)
It had it all, VoIP, whiteboard, games, duplex text chatting, joint web surfing just to name a few.
No chat program has come close to the features and ease of use since (if anyone knows of one that does, please let me know).
I miss DEC. I learned how to program with Turbo Pascal & C on a VAX machine when I was a kid on DEC machines in the hospital my dad worked at & would drag me to when he had me for the weekends... And then came along the SPARC Station in his office... was it running Solaris? I can't remember... omg!! That thing was leaps and bounds ahead of anything I use today... Who would have thought that a developer would have had a better environment to work with when he was 8 than when he's 30??
There's a veritable graveyard of dead gaming franchises and companies, but I'm going to vote for my most dearly departed...
MicroProse was an amazing company, devoted to making some ground-breaking combat flight sims as well as genuinely fun games (worms! x-com!). They were bought out by Hasbro, who immediately took them out of the flight sim market. The announcement about the buyout was made on December 7, 1998, a day which will live in infamy.
They also had a brief hold on the MechWarrior series, which after the third sequel fell into a state of consolitis after being sold to Microsoft. Not dead, but dead to me I suppose.
Quality US made cars, years ahead of their competition in Detroit. The Gt Hawks and the Avantis were *nice*. Never could afford either of those when they were new, but I did own a stude champ pickup and a sedan delivery. Once, back when I was making a lot more loot than now, I tried to buy an avanti 2 from a lot, but they would only offer a lease so I turned it down, but I got to do a "performance" test drive..although the salesman riding along with me didn't know that was going to happen until it was too late to say "no""...heh heh heh, dang quick little machines, tell ya whut....plush, too, real nice interior, six speaker blaupunkt, twin powered roofs, yada yada. Like I said, *nice*.
Probably cuased my share of greenhouse gas emissions increase that day, va-voom! heheheh
ya, not computer related, but the general question was "what companies would you add?", so there ya go.
Sonique had the coolest user interface of nearly any software I've ever used. Back in the early versions when it still used it's own engine, Sonique had an incredibly small footprint and download, yet arrived looking like a complete product. If I were to have to hire an interface design team, I would go out of my way to hire the people who designed that one. I haven't used Windows (at home) in years, but that was definately one of the coolest products I used on it.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Corel owns it. http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Produ ct/1152105038419
It's still used in a few fields where Word hasn't completely taken hold. I used to work at a hospital, and our Medical Coders preferred it to Word. I hear that the legal profession also is still mostly WordPerfect users.
Comment of the year
As gas prices increases, delivery-based businesses become even more unprofitable. Or more expensive. Or, more likely, both. I hope you don't think that delivery companies get free gas.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Actually, Stac won a nice big patent infringement suit against MS in '94, but afterwards bailed from the compression biz, and became Hifn in 1998. The core business is still compression and encryption, except now Hifn implements it at the chip level. And their HQ is in Silicon Valley, not Carlsbad, where Stac originated. (IIRC the CTO still lives in Carlsbad, even though Hifn has since shuttered the lab there.)
Karma-burning disclosure: I used to work for Hifn until over a year ago. I know folks over there, so, sorry, can't say much else about my stint.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
That was a pretty cool system when I first saw it in the 80s. IIRC, distributed file system, distributed processing, cool GUI, and even saw merged x86 runtime execution on the same box via an x86 processor. I seem to remember that some of their engineers did a computer graphics short film in their spare time using spare CPU cycles because that was how the system was designed.
Was saddened to see them purchased by HP and like many other HP purchases, their technology and innovation seemed to disappear. To a lesser degree, it kinda reminds me of Microsquish. IMO, the Apollo Workstation and the people behind it were awesome, are greatly missed, and are fondly remembered.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Lasting image/quote: "DUPE!"
How can those who have embraced Linux over the MS offerings forget Warp 4? Loved that OS and learned to like IBM for trying to compete with MS with that system. At the time, I'm convinced that it was the best PC based operating system out there.
"Not to say Microsoft is some sort of angelical organization, but they are certainly not guilty of "killing" Netscape."
Dedazo, you should get some sort of prize. You were able to put "Microsoft" and "angelical" together in a meaningful sentence.
See the movie, "Who Killed the Electric Car?". The GM product was pulled from the lease-holders despite strenuous objections from those who drove these vehicles.
Remind me never to invest in your business plans. As telecommuting grows, people will be more free to go grocery shopping whenever they want, and delivery costs will skyrocket with gas prices. I think that's the exact opposite of the situation necessary for it to be profitable. Now, if people were always out of the house and working (and thus had no time to grocery shop, and were forced to go to the grocery store the same time everyone else was if they were going to anyway), and if gas prices were cheap enough to keep down costs, delivering groceries would be a great business model.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Sco unix.
--
Toro
Imagine what the computing world would be like today
:-(
if the Lisp Machines had succeeded, even just long
enough for the availability of cheap, powerful systems?
We might all be running Genera, instead of Windows!
I remember "Apache 2000" that came with a 200 page manual printed in high quality paper and a very good translation to my native language (Hebrew). These day I feel happy if a game even comes with a printed manual. I don't care much for translation since it usually look like they use babelfish to produce it.
Just took too damn long.
DesqView was one of my favorite programs. Running multiple bbs nodes and doing something else at the same time was way cool back in the day. Then a buddy introduced me to Unix. :)
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
Greiner's article is pretty lame. If it had a bit of background or insight, it could have been a great read. But it's just a list of companies names with a bare minimum of detail. Not even a decent analysis of why they failed. At least the Slashdot comments give some insight the CIO author was lacking.
Which brings us to DEC:
> 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.
DEC's systems were a large computer surrounded by dumb terminals. They died because Olsen didn't want to know about the PC.
Now remember that 'Network PC' craze of a few years back? Larry Ellison's call for a PC that was so stripped down it was just a prettier dumb terminal. When Ken Olsen heard about the Network PC, he got excited and declared he had been vindicated. The market disagreed. Olsen was an extremely arrogant man. He knew about the PC but didn't want to know about it. He hated Unix with a vengeance, preferring his DEC's own VMS (I used both: VMS truly sucked). He had a chance to form the OSF (Open Software Foundation) to unite Unix vendors, but he was sniping and suspicious. He and IBM Chariman John Akers wouldn't even shake hands in public. Unsurprisingly Microsoft rode all over them.
He claims he was misquoted. His actions suggest otherwise: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/kenolsen.asp
I had a Rana disk drive that offered a whopping 180k. Problem is, the motor was inadequately shielded, so I had to wrap the thing in aluminum foil for it to be able to work.
This is my sig.
http://www.cio.com/article/print/125263
King of kings and Lord of lords
There's a great on-line book on the rise and fall of Wordperfect by Pete Peterson: http://www.fitnesoft.com/AlmostPerfect/
Almost Perfect is a rollicking good read, with something for everyone in it.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
Can't believe no one has mentioned the Zaurus series of awesome Linux palmtops, which Sharp announced they were discontinuing at the start of this year. There is a petition BTW.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
MainActor, a decent(ish) video editor for linux. :(
It was withdrawn from market just around the time I started using it
living the dream
This seems appropriate...
Though the Amiga was well known in the USA, I don't think anyone could dispute a great loss in the UK was the Acorn computer. First the BBC Micro, which drew many of us to IT in the first place and can be credited with making assemble language non-scary, and then the Acorn Archimedes which brought RiscOS in 1989 (which was and remained superior to Windows95 despite over half a decade head start). They booted instantly, were bomb-proof, and encouraged people to tinker under the hood. You could knock up a GUI app in BASIC in minutes, before the idea of VisualBASIC was a gleam in the creators eye. Many of us owe our careers, the idea that IT can be fun and challenging rather than a dull money-making exercise, to Acorn. I just hope that one day in the future Linux will be able to reach the level of UI and productivity that I enjoyed over 15 years ago on my Acorn. (eg note to Beryl developers, can I please hold down my right mouse button on a scroll bar to be able to pan 2-dimensionally at will over a window?). It was to me what I guess the NeXT was to Steve Jobs. RIP Acorn.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Tandem as a company, yes, is dead.
Compaq bought Tandem, HP bought Compaq.
You can still purchase hardware support for Any "Tandem" that doesn't use switches on the front to boot the system. (yeah, these machines still used punch cards 20 years ago) So... "K-series" is supported and the newer "S-Series" is supported as well. The things still run Guardian(OS) They're still Non-Stop machines. Best of all... (for HP) They're still as expensive as fuck.
FWIW your Bank and your Cable television provider are probably using Tandems/NonStop systems.
"Foxpro was acquired by them. More importantly MS is still keeping the project alive after all of this time."
FoxPro is dead now. Killed by software's Dr. Death. There will be no more versions.
The twisty-turny non-standard things Microsoft did to FoxPro killed xBase. People jumped to FoxPro, which was never enthusiastically supported by Microsoft management.
Breif by UnderWare Why: Best editor ever. Death: Died with Borland.
Coherent by Mark Williams group Why: Cheap Unix for x386 before Linux. Death: by Linux/FreeBSD.
Banyan Vines by Banyan Why: Easy network resource sharing on a LAN/WAN. Death: by Netbios and TCP/IP.
There are probably a few more that would take me all night to list...
Origin, Accolade, Norton (Symantec Killed), Sub-Logic (Microsoft assimulated), InterPlay, Applied Engineering, etc.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
Sort of decent (once appropriately "declawed") if funky-looking piece of hardware, brain-dead business model.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Here's another dearly departed, the 3D graphics company 3dfx. Nothing else came remotely close in performance to a Voodoo2 SLI setup when it first came out, and for quite some time afterwards. Sadly, the company ended up bankrupt due to mis-management, with the remains picked over by nVidia.
Uh, without sounding trite... "Mod parent up."
Anymore, most people write "any more" as, well, "anymore."
"Anymore" became the more preferred version in the 20th century, and that was last century.
Hmph! Worms was written by Team 17, not Microprose. It was originally an Amiga game.
I agree that XCom rocked, thou. One of the best games of all time. MechWarrior is DESPERATELY needing a new PC incarnation as well.
What DEC did best was service. They made IBM and HP look bad. 24/7 2 hour uptime guaranteed.
DEC was totally into the PC market. The Micro-Vax sold like hotcakes. They were not into Intel and Microsoft. For those of you that were around back then, look through the list and see how many good ideas died because of lies from Intel and Microsoft. WordPerfect didn't die because of the sale to Novell or the Microsoft claims of buggy version. What made WP great was perfect-script which allowed WP, much like Excel or AutoCAD, to be modified into a data input front end.
I bet anyone can go through the list and mark every death with a lie campaign by Microsoft or Intel. But we wouldn't waste our time on those two.
Origin Systems, Inc. (OSI) mainly known for the Ultima series, personally for me it was Ultima Online killed by "In September 1992, Electronic Arts acquired the company." and Richard Garriott left in 2000.
Was more or less the first mmorpg by modern standards, quite amazing in its day, but declined rapidly for several reasons, I mainly blame the 'expansions' released after Garriott left, some were worse than others. anyway.. my lame 2 cents.
s/©//g
How can you play MW on a console? You need like 30,000 keybinds to play that game (not a criticism of the game, I love MW2, and a lot of keybinds is good for me in a game).
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
That is all.
Pointy-Haired CIO
All of your Betamax are belong to us!
In Soviet Russia, Fidonet connect YOU!
Transputers: Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
How convenient to compare the lowest resolution that the oldest Amiga (mid 80's) could generate with "Any PC with VGA graphics (..) since mid-1990s". Maybe we can compare 3d graphics quality of a virge s3 card from 10 years ago ( set to lowest resolution ) to any current graphics card of today?
I think Ken was right, from a business case viewpoint.
(The famous home computer quote is right also, when considered in it's context.)
We'd call it TCO now, and per-seat minis with terminals made far more sense then PCs.
DEC All-In-One and like products supplied integrated word processing, email, scheduling, file access, and other services. They did all that dedicated word processors did (then a significant competitor in the office) and much more at only slightly greater cost. It took years for similar quality products to appear on PCs, and it wasn't until the office suite wars they could integrate to any significant degree. And with centralized systems administration was a magnitude easier, an issue we still wrestle with today.
Rather it was the commitment required to purchase a mini that killed them.
A PC with the works cost $10k then, a fraction of what a mini did. It was affordable by departments out of their own budgets; indeed determined individuals could justify their purchase as office tools. It was about the same cost as a dedicated word processor, but much more versatile (plus didn't require a contract signed off on by Legal & Accounting, who'd have blocked 'em.) Thus they trickled in the back door to companies, one pioneer at a time, often into Legal or Accounting.
By contrast a mini or a word processing system was a corporate decision. Particularly a mini, which required dedicated facilities and staff. Senior (older) management was dubious of their benefit and resistant to the significant commitment required to change their business processes.
Thus PCs won out and minis died. Not on the basis of technology or value but corporate sociology.
With shorter purchasing cycles and less professional administration the resulting PC software market was far more vibrant then the mini market ever was. Products quickly rose and fell, new categories appeared almost overnight, dozens of products flourished in immature markets. Professional systems administrators, 'till then used to endless meetings and air-conditioned quarters, were appalled at the Wild West atmosphere, short-sightedness, and cumulative "overbuying" in the PC market. Some retreated to the safety of what they knew, other figured when it's raining soup to get out a bucket and embraced the new paradigm.
Could Digital have competed?
Sure. The PC market wasn't inevitable. It was still closely controlled by IBM, who weren't positioned to capitalize on the tiger they had by the tail. It was a fragmented space with numerous small incompatible competitors without the breadth & depth of Digital's offerings nor their extensive support systems. (If the IBM BIOS hadn't been successfully clean-room reverse-engineered then widely licensed the PC market would have remained severely stunted.)
However to compete DEC would have had to compete, to educate their potential customers about their advantages, and Ken Olsen & crew refused to do so. Instead they considered the superiority of their technology to be evident to anyone who did their research. And it might have been. But the market wasn't full of people and companies with committees & consultants doing comprehensive research; it was secretaries and accountants and progressive mid-level managers who wanted this new tool and were able to, again, buy PCs without too much oversight.
So Ken Olsen was, IMHO, right about the value of his products. Just disastrously wrong about the market and his need to sell to it.
(My first "real" PC was a close call between a DEC Rainbow and an IBM XT. I went with the IBM because I could also get a "Baby Blue II" card to put in it running CP/M on it's own Z80, just in case IBM DOS didn't pan out. Also the very cool IBM "Color Card" and a Hercules graphics card for mono. It was a very shu-weet machine, IBM XT serial # 384. I later became a manager at The Computer Museum, formerly The Digital Computer Museum, where I had the pleasure of meeting & chatting with Ken Olsen several times.)
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Show me a computer today that has independent rez screens that can be layered (pulled down) on the same display.
None?
They chose a video speed bus that killed my eyes until I did a muti-sync monitor.
I leave it up to the reader to google "amiga video toaster"
I went to a MacWord show and they were "selling" the VT. Uh... not really. They were selling a front end serial cable connnected software system that connected to an Amiga. They showed it to me after my badgering.
That was then. This is now. In the day it was hot stuff.
And even today it is hot. See above about mixing rez on the same screen. It cannot be done today.
qz
Well, I could claim that I was trying to be funny, but unfortunately, the "any more" was a mistake on my part. Several of the other items were trying to be funny, but I did get this one wrong.
Thanks for pointing that out; I won't be doing that again.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
The iSmell so deserved to die the horrible death that it did. Like the ink jet printer profit model, they planned on selling the smell imaging device for cheap, and then totally gouging you on the scent cartridges.
iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer:
Symbolic Olfactory Display:
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
I've never tried any of those actually, are they really that much fun? Regular videogames leave me "meh" mostly,no interest. And I'm on dialup and also a cheap bastige, are there any you can play on slow speed connections and don't cost much or are free? And let you run Linux as the OS? I admit near total ignorance of the subject. Not that I need any more hobbies or timewasters, but always willing to try something new if there is some point to it (I guess with these games it's half fun, half meeting people online, or what?)
I was never a big CompuServe user -- I tried the service once, but it was too expensive and I never got involved in the discussion-forum aspect of it, which if TFA is to be believed, was the main draw (I always wondered what the hell people liked about it). I pretty much stuck with BBSes and the occasional tryst with AOL (hey, they had a good shareware archive) until the local university started handing out SLIP accounts, and after that I pretty much forgot about online services.
I wonder though -- if CompuServe's forums were so active, did they make any effort to archive them at all? I've always thought that the DejaNews/Google Usenet archive is pretty cool; it's the closest thing that the Internet has to a historical record. But I never really thought about the vast amount of stuff that was in online services and even major BBSes. I assume most of it has been lost/deleted over the years (probably wasn't practical to retain much when data storage was in the tens of dollars per MB), but it would be neat if any of it was still out there. Sure, 90% of it is probably garbage, flamewars, and ASCII porn, but there'd undoubtedly be some interesting stuff in there too. (Just like there's some neat gems in the Usenet archives.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I don't know why, but it seems nobody mentioned HP calculators yet.
Their notation was a bit weird (RPN), but after you got used to it, you wouldn't want to miss it. Up to the HP48 the machines incredibly well made - they even felt like high quality...
I just wanted to mention them...
Ulli
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
Founded by: Steven Jobs
Death by: bought by Apple
What I miss: The NeXT Cube was ahead of its time in so many ways you can't begin to list it.
Could be worse. Could be raining.
Banyan was a PC networking company - their server ran a tweaked Unix. It was brilliant. Their streettalk directory service was (and maybe still is) WAY better than Netware's bindery or netbios or whatever. Huge networks (I heard tell the US Army had 30,000 servers on it) on then slow WAN comms. We used to have 8 sites with 256K links (fast for those days). We had one centralised menu system that all sites shared. You could authenticate across a WAN, shared services were simple to use, integrated SNA and other gateways, etc, etc. Way ahead of their time.
They crapped out in the mid nineties - bad marketing or maybe MS or Novell just squeezed them. From memory one of those bought the rump of the company after it had just about died. A real loss.
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
Man I miss mine. And by miss, I mean I should really pull it out of the box again. But since I have long ago thrown away all those issues of Byte and Antic, I'd have to write all the software myself. Don't think I'll ever throw that thing away.Spent 2 summers trying to scrape up the cash for an ST.
Thanks Dad. Can't believe you paid $800 for it. Great Christmas though. Never told him I wanted an IBM, made the mistake of saying computer. Could have been much worse, Like a Tandy./shudder/
Hard to believe it had a color thermal printer in like 1984.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
The one i like to see in this Dearly Departed list is Windows Me and Windows Vista.
Me was the Most unstable OS ever, and Vista is the most resource hog ever.
Although in reality i like to see Microsoft as a dearly departed company, bought over by Apple in a LBO.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
What the OP is referring to is that the Sorcerer's Stone and the Philosopher's Stone are different names for the same thing, neither of which have anything to do with Harry Potter.
In NA the Sourcer's Stone is always referred to as such going back hundreds of years, it is just a different evolution of the language.
Are you saying that buying Foxpro made tons of other companies go out of business? Or are you just trying a vain and quite contrived appeal to emotion?
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
OMFG! I had my first network over serial cable with those games. Don't remember the names, there was a F1 and an air dogfight one. Not to mention countless hours on the F-119, F-15 and F-117.
On the F117, you had to recognize the planes based on their manual prints as a way to prove you had the original game before it starts. That way I've learned the distinct forms of every available combat plane. I always thought that was a great way to protect their software as I've learned in the process. Eventually, I knew them all and didn't need the manual anymore, so it was very quick.
Thanks for bringing up my childhood this on this morning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_(text_editor)
In addition to the features listed on wiki, it supported easily-creatable multiple windows (onto the same file, or different files) and the ability to select/cut/paste rectangular blocks of text. 'Twas the first (and probably last) time I have experienced a true order-of-magnitude increase in productivity from any software product.
I administered a VINES/Streettalk network back in the mid-1990's. The directory services were indeed NDS before Novell has NDS and AD before Microsoft had AD. I recall that we also communicated with Netware networks too back then. Interoperations were a bit clumsy, but then again back in the day interoperations were always less than ideal. The idea of a single sign-on for Banyan was great. Better than creating a user account on each and every Netware server that a user would attach to back in the days of Netware 3.x.
You forget that DEC was one of the original companies behind X-windows. Their concept of the networked device was excellent. Where they missed out was simply sales and marketing. Digital was justifiably proud of its engineering, both hardware and software, but it was almost impossible to deal with the company unless you were an expert yourself.
The hate for Unix was because of the perceived lack of engineering in early versions. It was an academic sandpit for may years until things settled down into the familiar world that we know now. Applications needed major rewrites to go between Unix variants.
VMS had one major advantage, there was a single concept behind it. It was expensive, but the libraries made sure that you could hop between programming languages without problems. The hardware was getting long in the tooth by the time they went RISC but Bob Palmer just tried to recover by selling off all the company silver.
I think the BeVocal public portal died an untimely death. At one point, there was TellMe and BeVocal. As far as voice input goes, BeVocal won hands down over TellMe, especially for driving directions. Here's an example:
BeVocal input - 1332 Mission Street, San Francsico, CA
Tell me input - San Francisco, CA..yes... wait for next prompt... Mission Street...yes... wait for next prompt... 1332...yes.... Took 10 times as long to give a starting and ending address. What a PITA!
Unfortunately for BeVocal, TellMe had AT&T funding behind it, and BeVocal was just a startup that had recently been acquired by another company. Such a shame.
IT is curious how /. posters seem to miss the marketing forest for the technical trees.
there are a lot of posts - probably correct - about all the technical goodness or badness of dec and amiga and so forth.
There are two things wrong with this
1st, people who say ibm pc set an open std are largely wrong - the mindset of commodity open stds simply did not exist in the early pc world, the ibm/ms dos was no more std then DR dos or the amiga
But even more important, it was not a technical thing: nonone ever lost their job buying ibm
if you remeber that period, buying computers from a non ibm source could cost you your job; that is why ibm could charge 6K, compaq 4K (somehow they became the amdahl of the era) and everyone else was 2K
(the preceeding paragraph is a little self contradictory: perhaps it would be better to say that IBM created a proprietary std that became an open std, to the HORROR of ibm)
Ibm pcs won because of marketing perceptions, it had nothing whatsoever to do with technical things.
finally there is visicalc - what all the posters with comments about bus speed and so forth are missing is that people by computers to do something.
Hmm, interesting SGI machines had very interesting architectures.
Intergraph was a huge company, until they switched to WinNT. Its like they jumped to the bottom of the barrel and tried to compete with EVERYONE. It seems like thats a cardinal rule of business. After that they mostly tanked, trying to compete with Intel and M$.
And the REX6000, a pda in the shape of a PCMCIA card. How cool was that? Citizen supposedly developed a small replacement that used usb, but we only had a proto photograph. Most likely overcome by cellphones and their pda-like sw. I just wish the cell sw was better.
They Live, We Sleep
Notably missing from the list.
For what it's worth, the CPS guys spent a lot of their time at Symantec talking about how inferior Norton Desktop was. Actually, so did the folks that called tech support. I joined the ex-CPS devs/QA after a short stint in Symantec support and got to hear all about their displeasure.
:)
That team created Norton Navigator, Norton Internet FastFind, Norton CrashGuard, LiveUpdate, HealthyPC, and PC Handyman under Symantec and then went on to release CyberMedia Uninstaller and CyberMedia Guard Dog after the whole lot of us left for, obviously, CyberMedia.
We pretty much went our separate ways after CyberMedia was acquired by Network Solutions/McAfee, though a few folks are still there. A chunk of them ended up at Tripwire.
Really, though, the best product we released was the Painkeep mod for Quake 1.
So, now, we have a lot of PCs and the drive is to use them as web browsers(OK, better than VT-100's at least) sharing CPU on a server. Maybe things are so simple after all.
I don't see things in black and white; I see the gray. Heck, I actually see in color, which makes things more difficult
They sold ice-cream from their website. It was also availible in stores. I remember liking they're flavors. They don't seem to be around anymore. Anyone remember them?
I really liked their text editor BRIEF. I had the version that ran on OS/2 and it was a nice editor with macros, autocomplete, brace count and other stuff that wasn't usually available on DOS/Windows. The OS/2 version could compile on a different thread while you kept typing or doing something else. One thing I miss to this day is block selection, I really wish Eclipse would implement that.
Go hug some trees.
Minimig (an FPGA re-implementation of an A500) was released as GPLv3+, as of a few days ago.
http://outcampaign.org/
It is normally called the Philosopher's Stone in America. I just think that they were concentrating on the fact that it was a stone needed by the dark sourcerer in Harry Potter, as opposed to a long explanation about the nature of Alchemy. Before Harry Potter, I had never heard of the Sourcerer's Stone before. But I have read extensively about alchemy and the Philosopher's Stone.
It was a better windows than windoze and it just kicked butt over MS Windows 3.x at the time. GEOS was originally developed for the C64, but later rewritten and ported to the PC with an integrated a word processor, spreadsheet, graphical filesystem view, scalable fonts, and it just never crashed.
What killed it was that they sold the SDK for far too much (I think about $200), which meant that casual software developers and students wouldn't pony up the money and create new shareware/freeware for it.
That and that Micro$oft had leveraged their position to extract exclusive OEM contracts forcing the OEMs to pay for a windoze license for every machine they sold regardless whether they installed windoze or not.
I hate sigs (especially yours which is a waste of my bandwidth)
Thanks for the clarification. If what you say is true I must say I find that extremely stupid. A philosopher is a wise man, someone who we would call a scientist today. The stone was created by this wise man, not by a sourcerer. AFAIK (I haven't read the book in a while) the stone was not owned by a sourcerer. Voldemort wanted it but that doesn't make it the 'sourcerer's stone' all of a sudden.
Very weird that they have translated it like they have.
-- Cheers!
Well, in the book, the stone was created by the Alchemist, Flaumel. In times past, there was a fine line between chemistry and sourcery when it came to performing alchemy and creating the philosopher's stone. Some question exists as to whether the stone was physical or spiritual (or both). This is what I was referring to as the details of alchemy, as some believe that what sounds like a physical process for creating the stone is actually an analogy for a mental/spiritual process in the mind. The stone was said to change the most common substance, maybe lead, into gold. Or maybe the stone changed a most common substance, the unenlightened human mind, into gold (an illuminated human mind). Hence the vagueness of the distinction between a wise man (scientist) and a sourcerer (philospher/seeker). Namaste - doug
That's enlightening, thanks!
-- Cheers!
Light years ahead of Tivo before corporate blackmailing made them cripple the ability to share recordings with friends and even cripple the intra-LAN sharing/streaming around your own house. Not to mention what I consider to be a superior interface. Tivo just had a cuter/"friendlier" look to its interface and a catchy bottle cap noise of approval plus a mutant TV-with-legs logo. Years after my 5040, using my HD Tivo (albeit, it's the drastically more crippled HR10-250 which seems to be a severely retarded Series 2) really sucks donkey nads in comparison. The memories have faded over the years, but I deeply miss even the most basic features of my 5040.
...ah, watching TV on my 5040 kicked ass. An occasional playback performance hiccup or a rare, but highly dreaded out-of-sync-audio recording, but it was totally awesome otherwise. Now I almost feel like taking it out of the closet and giving it a hug. I remember switching to Tivo and thinking "THIS is what won the DVR wars?!" I guess Tivo didn't get beat up quite as badly in the TV/cable backlash simply b/c they didn't do **** compared to the Replays. It's amazing how often it seems that laws are being created (or re-interpreted) in ways that drastically slow down or even drastically rewind the progress of invetiveness/technology or limit freedoms (even to simply watch TV how/where you like). Restriction (except as it relates to your privacy and should be mandatory) is the hot new feature of almost every new electronics product.
*Fully networked out of the box to the point of making it tough to miss a show, even if you did originally miss recording the show
*Timed jumps (instantly skip back/forward a specified amount minutes you desire at any time)
*Commercial break detection (sometimes flaky, but usually good)
*Can still playback recorded shows while surfing your list of recorded shows or the channel guide
*It knew how to delete things based on retention settings (combine this with Tivo's subscription priority list and it would be pure platinum...instead Tivo just mostly-quitely stops recording stuff instead of deleting lower priority subscriptions)
* Deeply customizable recording schedules
The sad thing is that at this point in history and the dip in space conquest, there are no large landmasses to flee to (or take over...whatever). Meanwhile, the seemingly accelerated backwards progress of the U.S. as it tries to piss away everything that made it an awesome alternative. Yeah, I just finished reading some YRO posts too. For years, I've honestly just hoped that I'm dead before the whole thing falls apart. The past ~8 years have been a surprisingly accelerated decay though.
"Prepare for a pride-obliterating bitch slap" - Ignignot