20 Jun
2005
20 Jun
'05
2:41 p.m.
On 20 Jun, 2005, at 14:04, William Donzelli wrote:
Philips (which is an entirely different company from Phillips) were
much more imporant as makers of embedded computers than as makers of
computers people know about.
My cousin used to work as an instructor in the norwegian navy, and he
said the Philips computers were used in most of our Missile Torpedo
Boats.
I suppose embedded systems easily end up as the forgotten branch of
computers, even though they probably are both more numerous and more
important than standalone boxes.
--
-bv
True. But
other computer makers of even lower stature have shown up
on the CC list, and in bitsavers. Apart from the big ones, it seems
to be just a random process that determines which machines appear and
which ones do not. For example, I can't think of any other reason why
Varian would show up in Al's archive and Philips would not...
I doubt there were ever more than 100 Phillips machines in the US at
any
given time. Perhaps in Europe they were more popular, but here they
were
effectively not even a tiny speck in the minicomputer industry.