29 Jul
2012
29 Jul
'12
7:24 p.m.
On Mon, 30 Jul 2012, Liam Proven wrote:
Morrow
was a major player in the CP/M world (Look for George Morrow's and
Howard Fullmer's names on S100 standards documents)
Morrow created one of the first "lunchbox" computers.
They signed a deal with Zenith with decent royalties, but, with a clause
that Zenith didn't have to pay any more royalties after a certain date.
There was a GIANT (by standards of those days) guvmint contract of LOTS of
machines for the tax-men. But, there was some serious cheating on the
terms of the contract award procedures, and the contract was delayed, and
awarded to Zenith, to take effect right after they would no longer have to
pay royalties to Morrow! Morrow never recovered.
. . . and, of course, recent years, management at HP has suicided the
company.
I'll take your word - Compaqs were so *very*
expensive that we mainly
ran them as servers in those days.
Ah! The cost of the pond!
Compaqs were high-priced here, as well, (~80% of IBM LIST price), but the
used ones eventually got to be very cheap.
Amstrad
Horrible plastic machines, mind. Reared on PS/2, I
hated 'em.
weren't very cheap here!
Also Morrow?
Never heard of these. Probably not sold in Europe or at least the UK. Zenith??
Very very rare; I think I only ever saw 2 or 3 of the subnotebooks,
the only machines unique enough to be worth the import cost.
Did HP?
Also eye-wateringly expensive
& thus rare. We sold AST, IBM, Viglen, Apricot, lots of Amstrads -
the 1st cheap PC
clones in the UK & also big in Germany under the Schneider brand, I
believe.
AST here was expansion boards, no complete machines;
never heard of Viglen,
and Amstrads were a rare oddity.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com