8 Jan
1999
8 Jan
'99
7:26 p.m.
On Sat, 9 Jan 1999, D. Peschel wrote:
I think the only way your scenario could have worked
would be for some
hppothetical company to have had a well-designed (made for future growth)
16-bit machine early in the game. A further irony is that DEC was such a
company, but didn't sell the fruits of their labor. I think some other
company might have worked, though. Intel? Corvus? Xerox??? Really, I
don't know if any company (in our universe) fits the bill.
Hewlett Packard! They should have owned the PC world, not DEC, not IBM.
They were always pushing the envelope, they understood usability issues,
including portability (my first computer was a 1974 HP65 -- no it's not a
calculator, it's an amazing portable computer that nothing could touch
until many years later).
If the Universe had warped a bit such that HP decided to market to
consumers much earlier or we had *many* more scientists and engineers
(their target market) in the world, we'd be sitting very pretty.
-- Doug