Slashdot Mirror
Garage Startup Develops "Personal Computer"
Hugh Pickens writes "In the summer of 1980, MIT graduates Donald Faber and Peter Haberle moved into an empty two-car garage and started work building the first-ever 'personal home computer.' Now almost 30 years later, what began as a humble two-man operation has since grown into an even more humble, even more cramped computer company, based out of an even smaller single-car garage. According to Faber and Haberle, a lot has changed since Xalaga was first founded. What was once a struggling $7,500-a-year business with only a dozen or so paying customers is now a desperate $6,400-a-year business with only a half dozen or so paying customers. Faber, who turned down a promising position with GE in order to start Xalaga, a decision he now says he regrets each and every waking day, told reporters that he knew almost immediately that his company had something not-at-all special on its hands. 'We sold only one computer that first year, then the following year it was three computers, then suddenly 10 computers, then just as suddenly five computers, then back down to three computers again, and finally only one or two machines every other year for pretty much the next decade,' said Faber, standing up from the plastic milk crate that now serves as his desk. 'Had someone told us when we first started that we'd be here today, operating out of a much smaller, somehow less expensive garage, we probably would have laughed right in their face.'"
disregard that
An onion article that I read IN PRINT yesterday is getting passed off as an April Fool's joke on slashdot? For shame.
Q.E.D.
Sadly this is the story of 99% of all start ups and home based businesses.
It took me time to realize this is "April Fool's Day." Dear editor, please warn members because it's quite frustrating to realise much later on that it's April Fool's day. Now I do not know which story to believe.
1980? 3.5 inch floppies? No way. 5.25 inch, only - just leaving the era of 8.0 inch!
28K RAM? What multiple of 4 is 28? 7? I don't think so. Get it right: 4 8 16 32. There could be 6 or 7 banks of discreet RAM chips - this would have been ridiculous to construct.
Good Onion, bad technology and history.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
...but seriously... Slashdot should make april 1:st suck less somehow. How about there being moderators that make fake stories disappear once they're found out or maybe just a button to click to hide stories with the tag aprilfools. That's probably better. Anyway, when I was a kid my mother used to wear a red shirt haha aprilfools it was green. stfu.
Honestly.
I always thought the Onion should post real news on April 1st, not that their rendition on the news is that far from the truth anyway. And not like this article is even from today.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
OLD STORY!! this is 2010!
Seriously /. This crap is not funny, has never been funny, will never be funny.
April 1. The day /. goes in the shitter. Every. Freaking. Year. Oh ho ho ho the hilarity! Be sure to post about Duke Nukem forever coming out today, I *never* get sick of that one. Or about the time your sent your new IT guy to the closet for a can of wifi grease. Yuk yuk yuk!
The. Hilarity. It. Burns.
See you tomorrow Slashdot. Until then have fun with Teh Funnae - the adults will be back tomorrow.
Redwood City, CA -- dateline. Geek who's been around for any longer than a couple years decides not to ignore Slashdot on April 1, and weed through all the lame jokes looking for actual, interesting stuff. Haha! April Fools!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
just deal with it.
(Eh, of course, it does end with today.)
Who would buy a computer called, "Xalaga".
Slashdot editors - I will come to your house and battle you in PVP until I chop off your arms you sick sons a bitches.
He never could resist a sweet face.
Slashdot sucks on April Fools day See you guys tomorrow.
I would think that one year, the Onion would report a real story for an April Fools joke.
this is from at least last week, maybe older. Not bothering to look it up but *snore*
Thanks for an old The Onion link, I guess
It's a big world, with many time zones, so for some of us, April 1st was yesterday.
Also, the tradition is to make a subtle joke to fool people, not waste the *entire* day making tired geek jokes.
More often than not, non-slapstick humor stems from insight, even if shallow. The Onion relies solidly on this effect and it may get old; I noticed their style before hovering my pointing-thingy over the fine link.
Now, this is a deserved slap in the face to the romantic visions we're in love with. Every year we dismburse large sums in movie theaters to see renditions of David-vs-Goliath, rags-to-riches, where the underdog wins through skill, perseverance or just being the good guy. Wake up and smell the (occassional) fail!
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
i just read this in the onion about 10 minutes ago.
/. is failing to entertain in this April fools day.
http://www.zaltair.net/
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
It took you two years to think of that?? Two years in between posts, and that's the best you can come up with? You sir, are a shitty troll.
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
Is that some sort of typo or something? That's just crazy-talk, that's what that is! Who ever heard of such a thing! Who would need something like that, anyway?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Well, I can tell you about the web design business I started with a couple of friends, where we landed one job, did the site, and the customer kept making changes and never got around to paying us the measly $300 we asked her for. Then I moved to another state and we broke up.
...) that we never even built the site.
... so, uh, yeah. I think that's why we don't hear about most of those failed business stories.
Or the time I got into the business of a web site that would rate fine restaurants in large cities. We started in Chicago where we lived, and one of the partners insisted on spending $600 on flashy business cards (glossy, with embossed silver ink in the company name--1000 cards for each of the three founders. I used 2 of mine, total. Still have the other 998 because I'm a packrat). Then we stumbled along for a year putting together the site and doing legal stuff, only to realize that not a single restaurant wanted to pay for our services, primarily because no other restaurants were already customers. How do you get customers without having customers? There's probably a good answer, but about that time (2001) Zagat's got a few million in venture capital to go online and do everything we were doing and more. So we closed up shop, settled our bills (of which the business cards represented about 75%), and that was that.
There's also the web site about nothing that a friend and I started with the idea we'd make a mint selling people themselves (if we're nothing, anything we sell had to come from the visitor, right?), but we got so bogged down in artistic philosophy and bad puns (nothing's better! nothing to lose! much ado about nothing
I also once wrote a novel, which remains unpublished. I think it's a good novel. A distant family connection who works in editing gave it decent marks. Somehow I've never gotten around to polishing it up and actually submitting the darn thing anywhere.
I worked for some other guys, out of their basement, over the course of a year as they tried to start a "help people build online stores" franchise. The only customer was some neighbors who agreed to try it when we gave them the kit for free, and who then never did a thing with it. Literally zero minutes spent trying to use our stuff. Not that I blame them.
Same guys hired me to write a book for their online darts store. Book never sold any copies. They had a plan to offer it as a bonus reward for large orders, but then sold the darts store. Come to think of it, that might not be entirely a failure. Except one of the two guys had to give up his part-time basement job and start commuting an hour and a half each way every day, and I'd call that a pretty big disappointment on his part.
Same guys also had me start another online store. It sold some product, but the credit card fees were so ridiculous after a few months we realized we were actually losing money on every sale, so that had to go.
Then they started a dog frisbees store. Business was good, but the hosting company was so messed up when we tried to cancel a few other domains they simply canceled everything, and then held the site name hostage for thousands of dollars when we wanted it back.
Then they tried some other frisbee stores. Despite bountiful volumes of sales, neither they nor the shipper bothered to keep track of actual sales or profits--for a few months they kept all the money that came in, and then the shipper realized he was supposed to be getting reimbursed for the cost of shipping and the original cost of the frisbees he was buying to ship on their behalf. So he started keeping all of the money that came in, to make up for back payments, trying to calculate what was owed by weighing the stack of printed invoices and guessing at the number of pieces of paper and the average sales value. Last I heard, it had been 3 years, and they still hadn't gotten back up to even.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
It's last week's news...
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
There is pizza and drinks in the lunch room. Come help yourselves.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
AUTOEXEC.BAT quote or it didn't happen.
How bad must things suck, for so many people believe this story, and then after belatedly realizing their temporal and intertubular coordinates, still believe it?
Engineers don't have steady jobs anymore. All of my breadboards, soldering irons, etc. are in boxes. It's hard to be a garage tinkerer when you have to move every few months because you don't have the rent. This is what is wrong with this country.
The article says *their* first personal computer. In 1980, the Apple II was 3 years old and VisiCalc had been out for a year. Nobody was creating *the* first PC at that time.
It's doesn't take a rocket surgeon to understand why we don't hear about failures. People hate talking about their mistakes whilst those who have been successful love telling it to everyone and then there are those who try exaggerate their accomplishments. It's human nature but also unfortunate in a sense. The thing is that if stories about failures - both personal and business - were more widespread, even if only anonymously, I think it would give shy and insecure people a lot more confidence. I remember how I whilst working a summer job thought that I must be the worst student in my class and haven't found work that is related to my field etc. etc. and felt really bad about myself. A couple of years later, I accidentally stumbled upon the CV of a fellow student that had worked in the same place but had a better job (she had left the file on a school computer that didn't require logins and I couldn't resist opening it, even if it wasn't quite right to do so). All of a sudden I found out that at least that girl, which had appeared so confident in her job, which really was better than anything I had dared to apply for, and boasted how good she was and consequently made me feel like shit, had had worse merits than I did. But I had simply believed so much of the bragging bullshit and success stories around me that I thought that everyone else is perfect. However, I don't think you can in any way blame people for not speaking about their failures even though finding out what reality is like, would give many insecure people a lot more confidence. Saying that "you only hear about success" doesn't always suffice to convince those who are really insecure since they would need to hear about failures that they can relate to.
I remember the year when Slashdot set all manner of cookies with names like "mothersmaidenname", "creditcardnumbers" and "bankinginfo". That was a good April Fools joke.
now get off my lawn.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Actually it was only a few minutes. The one that took him 2 years to think of was actually kind of funny.