4 Oct
2013
4 Oct
'13
12:43 p.m.
On 10/03/2013 03:30 PM, Jerry Wright wrote:
I do have one here that has been known to work. If I
remember right,
when you install the software, the machine wrote to the floppy some
kind of Machine ID. From then on only that machine could re-use the software.
I had many sets of software and remember getting the warning that the software
I was installing was for a different machine. Some Floppies had Machine ID
numbers hand written on them also.
What I remember (I was contracted to do the B&W terminal firmware) is
that the Fortune people enjoyed an almost incestuous relationship with
the staff at Sun. Fortune was very well-funded nearly from the outset
thanks to a $22/share IPO very soon after startup, which surprised a lot
of people. CEO Gary Friedman was more of a salesman than a geek and was
bounced out soon after the IPO (the object of several lawsuits).
Friedman had come from Itel, which had also gone belly-up.
Fortune died sometime before 1990, probably due to the proliferation of
80286 and 80386 cheap PCs.
Around 1981-83, there were lots of starry-eyed people with visions of
conquering the world with Unix running on the 68000. Anyone remember
Plexus, for example?
--Chuck