11 Dec
1998
11 Dec
'98
8:08 a.m.
The moral of
the story is that it's relatively easy to give a good demo,
slightly harder to do a real implementation, and then very hard to get
market acceptance and penetration for new ideas.
Thats one thing, the other is how superior design (soft
and hardware) can be dumped in favour of crapy PCs.
Back in the late 70s and early 80s we had at SIEMENS a
network of EMS 5800 systems - OEM versions of the Xerox
Star - all over Germany and most European dependances.
Of course not every Employee had one, since including a
laser priter it was some 100,000 Mark value, but at least
most departments that needed to. And in my opinion no PC (no Win, no MacOS and no
Next)
has catched up with the Star - and it's more than 20
years later !
Yup. I did get to see them and Ventura Publisher and there
seemed to be some similarity. Did Ventura start with ex-Star
folks?
BTW: Xerox' quality was just junk - from 10 systems
delivered to Witten (the SIEMENS plant where they
where configured and repacked) only 5 worked properly,
and 3 more could be reassembled from the five non
working. Like in the SU - 10 tractors delivered to
a farm coop and the farmers had to change parts
until at least 5 of them worked .... :)
They got real slipshod for a while, even on the copiers.
They lost a lot of that business to Kodak (who took over -- I think--
the IBM copilers).
Both DEC and Bell Labs ran those Kodak beasts and you could copy a whole
library on 'em without problems. Ask me about my CP/M doc set 8-).
Gruss
H.
Bill