21 Sep
2004
21 Sep
'04
4:05 p.m.
On Tue, Sep 21, 2004 at 08:05:51PM -0700, Vintage Computer Festival wrote:
If we go back to the original argument by Ken Olsen,
which is that there's
no reason to have computers in the home, Ken was not only completely
wrong, but disastrously wrong, as history has proven.
There's a story that Dave Ahl tried to convince DEC management (possibly
Ken Olsen himself) that it would be possible to package up an inexpensive
PDP-8/a rig that would easily fit in the trunk of a car, and would be
useable as a "home computer". It would have competed favorable with
IMSAIs, etc, on price, and would have blown them away in terms of product
quality. The answer to Dave's proposition was a variant of Ken's famous
quote.
Even a 4K PDP-8 can run some interesting stuff.
Of course in those days, whether it was an IMSAI or a PDP-8, the TTY was
an expensive peripheral.
-ethan
--
Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 22-Sep-2004 04:00 Z
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Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html