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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.'"
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.
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!
So all those IBM PC compatible systems that were sold with 640K RAM didn't exist either? You could have 8 sockets with 7x 4K RAM chips and 1x 4K ROM.
Well, duh.
They used 32k of RAM in the machine, but 4k of that was used to make the screen display ASCII porn on power-on, so only 28k was available to users.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I suppose that this is intended as an April fool's joke, but I can't figure out what part is supposed to be funny.
The only part that seems funny is that, in general, the thousands of garage start-ups that remain garage start-ups usually don't get any press coverage, so it's funny that this one does. Yeah, there are lots of them.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Who would buy a computer called, "Xalaga".
You realize 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. were just conventions to make things easier, right? There is nothing that locks you into those patterns, it's just things can be a bitch to manage if you aren't in one.
There were 24 bit processors, 6 bit bytes, etc. Base 2 is every bit as flexible as base 10, it's just different, and conventions have evolved to make things consistent and easy.
For example, with a 24 bit processor, you'll want to scale to a 48 bit processor to make backwords compatibility easier. The 8 bit base just fits in very nicely between base 2, octals, hex, and finally decimal. Conversions among these units is much easier working with an 8 bit base than other setups, and so all scaling goes off the 8 bit base.
None of it was tied to a 4 bit base though, that's just ignorant.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
It's from The Onion. It isn't one of their best articles.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Slashdot sucks on April Fools day See you guys tomorrow.
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.
"What multiple of 4 is 28?"
I know that one!, I know that one! It's (wait for it) 7!!!
Sure. But breadboarding a computer with 1980 processors (8080, 6502) would have sucked if you picked some funny multiple. How many machines were ever built where you could have 28K? I can't remember one. 1980 you had lots of 16K and 32K and 64K machines, with Zilog Z80's, running CPM. There were a smattering of new, 8088's and the new 68000 was in mini-class workstations - these had, sometimes, a whopping 256Kb!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Yup. Let's put 14 sockets for 512b RAM chips, in our new PC!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
/. 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
I think my TI/99 had 48K after I upgraded it, IIRC. That's because it started with 16K, and then I added a 32K memory expansion unit.
I don't know how you'd get 28K (perhaps 4 + 8 + 16?), but there's nothing confining you to memory sizes that aren't a power of 2. Probably, the main reason most computers were like that (at least at the base specs) is because memory chips were always manufactured like that, and it's easier/cheaper to build a system with only a single memory chip or bank. Later on, if the user upgrades it, they might wind up with a funny amount of RAM, like my current system which has 5 GB (started as 1GB, then I added another 4).
I never thought I see the day when I wished OMG!!!PONIES!!! back...
Seconded.
Hey, remember the year when Slashdot's April Fool's joke was that all the stories were actually serious? That was a good year.
You're an immobile computer, remember?
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.
'Zactly.
I used to demo / sell personals in the 79-81 years. (GW-Basic?) Nothing had but 4 or 16 base. Commodore and Apple had 4Kb models (The PET!). There were Apple ][ expansion cards for PR4 from third parties, that gave you funny numbers like 12 Kb.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
The funny part of the joke is that there are people who think that copying and pasting long portions of an article from The Onion to the Slashdot front page constitutes an April Fool's Day prank.
its making fun of apple.
and, you can get your wish if you run an older Firefox release.
http://www.downloadatlas.com/no_status_bar_links/slashdotter-by-christopher-finke.html
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares?"
That's just evil.
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