On Monday (08/14/2017 at 01:16PM -0700), Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: > > Yes, I recall that Neil tried to sell us on Stearns, but we elected to > go with the pack and use IBM. Good move that, in retrospect.
For sure. The Stearns was (deliberately) not a very good IBM PC clone-- using a true 8086, a Eurocard backplane connector and a custom BIOS that only allowed MSDOS (and not PC DOS) to run. The video was different... everything was different enough that all we did was hack just about every app that people wanted to run so that it would limp on the Stearns. Neil's goal at ETA (cc 1983) was to have a "paperless operation" and every engineer, every manager, every secretary (that's what we called them then) was to have a personal computer. Most of the people had never used a computer before and so we had to teach them what to do with them. However, it was amazing to watch and didn't take too long before they were all wanting REAL IBM PC stuff-- because they saw it on TV, in the magazines, everywhere-- and sadly, the Stearns really could not deliver. At the time CDC (and ETA by proxy) also had a group purchase deal with Zenith and so we began to see the Z100 (again not a PC but well supported software-wise) and finally the Z150 displace the Stearns as something you could really get work done with. As _the_ Stearns support guy, I had a Z100 :-) Chris -- Chris Elmquist
