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

[Ohreally_factor]

Since the story was submitted by Esther Schindler, can we call this Schindler's List?

Re:quick summary

[ink]

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

Re:quick summary

[arivanov]

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

Really? Have you actually programmed on a DEC system? That was the most abominable IO record access semantics I have ever met in my career. An average homework written in pascal for a CS course consisted of one page of open declaration followed by 5 lines of homework. Totally nuts. Add to that the joke known as the BSD Unix subsystem (your best friend if you want to hack a DEC). Add to that the totally insane file/node/resource naming convention. I had that sorry excuse of an OS pwn3d left right and center anytime I liked. It was done mostly to run rogue or nethack which were prohibited by the club of religious freaks in charge of the computer system (I understood that they constitute a happy sect much later). It ended with getting a pre-expulsion warning and the equivalent of a campus ASBO where I was not allowed to enter a terminal room. No thank you. It deserved to die. Even the really clumsy early PC Unixes were so much better, it was simply unreal.

Borland deserved to die as well. While it had a fantastic DOS/protected mode compiler and runtime it never understood the idea that future will be ruled by resource editors and visual controls. I have had to deal with their visual controls on Mac (yep, Turbo Pascal 1.x for Mac System 8), Windows (both TPW and Dephi) and I have even tried to implement a graphical extension of the Vision stuff. It deserved to die. Anything else aside a rapid application development environment that did not understand the value of ready controls and resources did not belong on the market. Microsoft came with their lame, buggy, but usefull foundation class libs and wiped the floor. No surprise there.

I can continue with the list. Every single one of them had serious technical reasons to depart. While we may have some fond memories of them - good bye and good riddance. Unless you feel masochistic to write an RMS open statement and build a GUI with TPW (or god forbit TP for Mac).

Re:quick summary

[Timothy Chu]

> Since the story was submitted by Esther Schindler, can we call this Schindler's List?

You mean that these companies are all still surviving in a bunker or warehouse somewhere? Send my love to WordPerfect 14, wherever she is!

Re:quick summary

[frdmfghtr]

Or try reading the printable version.

Re:quick summary

[rs79]

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.

Re:quick summary

[Frumious Wombat]

Yes, I have, and I still miss them. Your problem was that you (apparently) tried to use Unix on them, rather than VMS, and the common language interface (which allowed you to do system calls and fancy string handling in fortran 77). Once you grokked the Orange Wall (and later Grey Wall), VMS was easy to manage, and rock solid. It used funky networking of course (CMUTEK tcp/ip still gives me shudders), but if you had all VAXes, then DECNET was no big deal. Truly a loss, and superior to many of its successors.

I miss my VAXstation and the 11/785.

turbo pascal 2 was also great, but they never cleanly made the transition to the Windows world. I'm sorry to lose the simplicity of TP2 (which would be great now because you'd just link it to other libraries, rather than rely upon Borland's oddball implementations), and there was always the attempt to be different, such as Turbo Prolog.

Re:quick summary

[rs79]

"DEC Western Research Lab was a fantastic place with a great deal of innovation and freedom, and
watching it shrivel and die was painful."

What he said. The firewall was born there as well as the www search engine.

About 8 or so years ago a few of us got calls from the white house - Ira Magazner, Clintons senior science advisor wanted to meet with all players in the domain name mess (to stab us in the back it turns out) and Brian Reid was one of those people. He was director of the NSL at DEC ("decwrl").

The day before I got an email saying he couldn't come and that Compaq had bought Dec and he wasn't sure he'd even have a job. I asked how this could even be possible and his reply stuck in my mind quite firmly: "Compaq didn't get enough money to buy Dec by being innovative".

Re:quick summary

[Skidge]

But it's well known that writing top-N lists is the easiest way to get your article on Digg and pull in the ad revenue. The masses demand easy to digest, light on content top-N articles.

Re:quick summary

[Frumious Wombat]

What about Wordstar? Glorious program in the early DOS era before WordPervert evolved into a usable product, ran on DOS or CP/M, excellent formatting controls, and didn't need keyboards with either function keys or arrow keys. You could have run it off an ADM3a.

My college, after trying many arguably superior programs (XYWrite, Final Word, Wordstar), mysteriously settled on WordPerfect, probably because a manager thought something driven by func keys that came with a little keyboard template to remind you of what they did was easier. I never understood how a wordprocessor that constantly required you to removed your hands from the home-row keys was supposed to enhance my writing. Then I discovered that nobody can touch-type anyway, so it wasn't making as much difference as I thought.

I'd still probably rather use emacs and TeX, but that wasn't even a dream on early 80s PCs.

Re:quick summary

[maxwell demon]

Ok, you named the first of the items from the top ten of lame top ten lists on Slashdot. So what are the other nine items? :-)

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

[adrianmonk]

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.

Yeah, but after that, they dropped the ball spectacularly on one occasion after another over a period of 5+ years. When C= bought the platform, the competition had basically 320x200 graphics, 8 or 16 colors, no sampled sound at all, and 640K limit on RAM. The Amiga had 640x400 graphics, 4096 colors (in certain modes), built-in stereo 8-bit sampled sound, and a 9 MB limit on RAM. 8 or 10 years later, the competition had 800x600 graphics with 16 million colors, stereo 16-bit sampled sound, and supposed 64MB of memory. By that time, the Amiga still had 640x400 graphics, 4096 colors, 8-bit sound, and a 16MB limit on RAM.

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.

Re:quick summary

[TonyMillion]

I used to work for a company that made escalators and elevators.

They were called Schindlers Lifts

Re:quick summary

[ChameleonDave]

Yes. Which is why I hate it when people think the name was "dumbed down" or whatever. It's just a cultural difference; different names for the same thing. If it had been kept as the original name people wouldn't have gotten the reference.

That's such a weak defence. Yes, it's a cultural difference: culture v lack of culture, or broad culture v dumb pop culture. If a book called Elementary Astrophysics is renamed New-fangled book-learnin' all 'bout star-gazin', 101 for a given market, you have to ask whether the intended audience is a bit backward, and not make excuses about "cultural differences". This is on a par.

The only sensible defence is to say that ordinary Americans are quite sophisticated, but the publishers and film studios make patronising decisions for them, due to pre-conceived ideas. I'll listen to that, because it's plausible and I want to believe it.

Netscape?

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:Netscape?

[dedazo]

Netscape killed themselves with uncanny precision long before Microsoft started bundling IE with Windows, never mind actually shipping a viable version of IE. Navigator 4 was, much like the first WordPerfect for Windows, the worst possible product at the worst possible time. Netscape's reaction to their inability to ship working software and Microsoft's ability to do so was to go whine about it to the DoJ, which promptly nailed Microsoft to the wall.

The "Microsoft killed Nescape" meme is completely wrong, but most people who are predisposed toward MS to begin with don't realize that or simply don't care because it's inconvenient.

Not to say Microsoft is some sort of angelical organization, but they are certainly not guilty of "killing" Netscape. Marc Andreessen and Co. are solely responsible for that. Just go read Jamie Zawinski's diary and do the math.

Re:Netscape?

[Blakey Rat]

I agree with you, and I offer a bit of evidence in the form of a control group.

Everyone knows that Netscape lost to IE on the Windows platform, because of Microsoft bundling IE with the OS for free. What's interesting to me is that Netscape also lost on the Macintosh platform, despite the fact that Apple included both Netscape and IE for free with the OS. Even though I'm sure I'll get flamed by Slashdotters, IE was simply a better product at the time.

The sad truth is that Netscape killed themselves with a horribly bloated and buggy product. IE may not have been the golden standard, but Netscape crashed every hour and ran slow because of the included email/IRC/kitchen sink that were bundled with the product, despite the fact that virtually nobody used or wanted them.

(Before I made the leap to IE on my Mac, I had to dig through the Netscape.com FTP site to find the old 4.0.8 version-- the last stand-alone version they made before shoveling the crap in, and the last one that could run longer than an hour without crashing.)

Re:Netscape?

[tkrotchko]

"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.

Webvan

[KingSkippus]

What companies or products would you add?

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.

after seven pages

[yagu]

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!).

several paragraphs of content

[everphilski]

spread across 19 pages DESERVES TO DIE!!!

Borland, DEC and Amiga

[RancidPickle]

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.

Re:I'm drowning in page hits!

[LiquidCoooled]

There is nothing

Re:I'm drowning in page hits!

[LiquidCoooled]

wrong with the format

i got one

[Paktu]

Sega Dreamcast, anyone?

Thank the Sony PR machine for that one, folks.

but i thought that all non-tech staff were useless

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I'm drowning in page hits!

[LiquidCoooled]

if you get paid.

Re:I'm drowning in page hits!

[LiquidCoooled]

Burma Shave!

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.

19 different pages?! Forget it. Here's mine

[bryan1945]

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

Re:Anti-MS zealots

[hurfy]

Worst company killer is Symantec without a doubt. Everything goes in but nothing comes back out :( At least MS usually buys someone out cause they want something instead of simply to keep you from getting something from the other guys :/

I think they scored 2 on this list alone. Including my beloved Central Point tools (which i still use on my 386) altho i could use an update to the antivirus ...

My addition: Wang (I have our old 2200 and a PC)
wonderful stuff but late to upgrade and when the PC came out they tried to keep it propriatary like all the heavy iron. Their PC was actually quite good but only ran their own programs :(

hehe, i still have working versions of: Central point tools, wordperfect, the deskview stuff, and something else on list i think :)

Add Another One

[NotFamous]

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"

Osborne Computers

[Sounder40]

OK, showing my age, but how can a list like this leave out the Osborne Computer Corp.?!?

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...

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

[Kenshin]

By the time Robert Palmer took over, it was not clear to anyone at the time that DEC would ever again be relevant.

But DEC was simply irresistible!

Re:DEC did their best to fail

[Anonymous Coward]

DEC failed for several basic reasons, but primarily it was due to a lack of marketing muscle.

Ken Olsen had a pet theory that having several rival projects solving the same problem
would produce an optimum solution that would then take the market by storm. To a certain
degree, he was right, and DEC had many elegant solutions for a while. The problem was that
competition evolved, and each competitor zeroed in on a particular product space, and
DEC wasn't prepared to articulate what made its product(s) better than its competitors'.
Ken Olsen didn't seem to realize that sometimes you needed to actually make an effort
to show off a product to prospective customers and explain how your product was better
than the competition's. Just taking orders when the phone rang wasn't enough...

Hence, Sun was able (particularly after it hired away several senior engineering managers
and other talent from DEC) to eat DEC's workstation business. HP and IBM went after the
server business. Others grabbed the other business, such as datacomm/networking.

This, combined with an institutional hatred for anything that wasn't Invented Here (meaning
stuff like UNIX, TCP/IP, etc.), meant that the VAX/VMS mindset continued to control product
conception, design, development and deployment well after it should have been apparent that
a more generic mindset (i.e., multiple architectures and operating systems) should have prevailed.

The VMS folks did NOT like it when internal benchmarking showed that Digital UNIX ran
~10% faster on the VAX8600 (and 8650) than on VMS. The same thing happened under Digital UNIX
and Alpha, too. Neither of which was made common knowledge on the street, of course.

Compaq's purchase of DEC was a joke from the very beginning. The phrase "Industry Standard
Platform" was uttered with a heavy German accent from Day 0 throughout the hallowed halls of DEC,
yet the Houstonians still scratched their heads in amazement that DEC was able to sell its
products with a double-digit markup (and gross profit margin) and not just 6% (on a good day
with a tailwind, which is what they were used to). But, obviously, it was more important to
shut down profitable, smooth running manufacturing operations in Salem, NH (an hour from the
engineering nexi of Nashua and Maynard/Marlboro) and Burlington, VT, so as to subsidize the
much more expensive operations out in Compton, CA which specialized in hiring contract workers
that worked for 2-3 months, then were released and replaced with more contract workers who
needed to be trained how to build the company's products. Productivity was abysmal, of course,
but that didn't matter to Houston, of course. Software Engineering was a complete mystery
to Houston as well - if it didn't run on Windows, it didn't exist, right?

Robert Palmer's dalliances didn't help, either, and caused product innovation to generally
nosedive. The fun was gone, there was no incentive, and no one in management gave a damn
one way or the other.

So, yeah, DEC imploded, due to a severe lack of leadership at the technical, marketing and
corporate levels.

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.

Re:DEC did their best to fail

[jollyreaper]

By the time Robert Palmer took over, it was not clear to anyone at the time that DEC would ever again be relevant. But DEC was simply irresistible! It's so fine, there's no telling where the market went.

Re:DEC did their best to fail

[tkrotchko]

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.

Re:Link to single page

[ElephanTS]

ad-laden? Bin-laden's brother?

Obvious one: Acorn Computers

[horza]

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.

Re:Anti-MS zealots

[NullProg]

:( At least MS usually buys someone out cause they want something instead of simply to keep you from getting something from the other guys :/
No, and your comment is disturbing. Microsoft has a past history of denying PC Users access to the competition. Spyglass for OS2/MAC/Unix was killed after Microsoft bought them and rebranded it Internet Explorer. So were all the Non-DOS/Windows Sub-Logic games (Flight Sim). Visio used to work perfect under OS2 until Microsoft bought them.

Please remember who your dealing with. The text below is all recorded trial evidence, not speculation.


While DRI and Novell were placing their hopes in DR DOS, IBM tried to end the Microsoft monopoly with OS/2. IBM started selling OS/2 in competition with Windows 3.0 in 1990. Microsoft worked hard to keep Windows applications from running acceptably on OS/2 and to prevent the development of OS/2 applications. Besides holding back technical information needed to make Windows applications work on OS/2, Microsoft prohibited users of its software-development tools and otherwise freely redistributable software modules from using them for any operating system but Windows. The lack of applications alone would have doomed OS/2, but Microsofts attack on IBMs PC business was even more damaging. In October 1994, Microsoft proposed a new Windows license that raised the royalty IBM paid to $75 per machine for Windows 95 from the $9 IBM had paid for Windows 3.1. Because IBM sold between 5 million and 6 million PCs per year, these basic terms would have raised IBMs royalty payments to Microsoft from around $40 million to $330 million a year. IBM could reduce the royalty if it agreed to Microsofts demands to "adopt Windows 95 as the standard operating system for IBM" and ensure that "Windows 95 is the only OS mentioned in advertisement." This meant nothing less than killing OS/2 to get a lower price on Windows. In July, IBM bought Lotus Development. IBM planned to bundle Lotus SmartSuite on its PCs and sell SmartSuite to other manufacturers in competition with Microsoft Office. Three days later, Microsoft completely cut off negotiations for Windows 95. Microsoft later demanded that IBM not ship SmartSuite for six months or a year as a condition to resuming Windows 95 negotiations.

Microsoft was trying to kill OS/2 while Jackson was reviewing the proposed DoJ-Microsoft settlement. On Aug. 8, 1995, the DoJ announced it would not block shipment of Windows 95. On Aug. 21, Jackson approved the settlement. Microsoft was still refusing to license Windows 95 to IBM. With the settlement in place and the prospect of hundreds of millions of dollars in lost PC sales without Windows 95, IBM caved in 15 minutes before Windows 95 was announced. Microsofts Mark Baber had asked IBMs Garry Norris, "Where else are you going to go? This is the only game in town." IBM ended up paying $47 a copy for Windows 95. At the previous rate, IBM would have paid around $120 million to $200 million in royalties from 1996 to 1998, but the new terms exacted a price of $998 million and made IBMs PC prices uncompetitive with other major vendors. Ultimately, IBM had to kill either OS/2 or the PC business it had founded.


Full text, http://reactor-core.org/in-microsoft-we-trust.html

Enjoy,

Re:Amiga had 320x200 graphics resolution

[qzulla]

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

Re:Link to single page

[Hooya]

> ad-laden? Bin-laden's brother?

No, bin-laden's brother would have to be src-laden.