On 6/19/2013 7:36 AM, John Gilmore wrote:
The classic business-school analysis of DEC's misfortunes makes them
an instance of the effects of "disruptive technology": microprocessors
replacing mnicomputers.
That might answer the how, but not the why. I attribute it to bad
management that failed to innovate in a timely fashion, didn't provide
proper technical direction (1), nor effective sales. Ultimately I blame
Ken Olsen: "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in
his home." (2) As a glaring example of this. DEC marketed three
distinct lines of PCs, all failures.
Gerhard Postpischil
Bradford, Vermont
(1) AMS acquired a DEC-System 20 in the seventies. To get acquainted
with it, I tried a Monopoly game (about 1000 lines) written in BASIC.
The source files were rounded up to a word boundary, padded with nulls.
After a system update that tracked exact file length, loading an old
file resulted in an error message for each null.
(2) In a talk given to a 1977 World Future Society meeting in Boston.
Olsen later explained that he was referring to smart homes rather than
personal computers. At snopes.com is an article explaining that his
statement, in original context, was a little more plausible - he meant
computers that controlled operation of a house, not a PC.
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