David> But you should read the ENTIRE item, and understand the David> context! I just did. It looks like an amazing case of trying to spin the story and make it look like Ken didn't miss the PC opportunity entirely. It won't wash. He did miss it, and his attempts to spin it into something else after the fact are disappointing. Besides, never mind what he thought he meant when he talked about it a decade or two later. What matters is what DEC people (and others) thought he meant in the early days of the PC. For that audience, the obvious meaning of the single sentence is what was heard and what set the direction, and the rest is history. paul

On Tue, 21 Sep 2004, Teo Zenios wrote: Have you ever heard of a thing called video games? This is silly and specious. There were PLENTY of uses for a computer in the home back in the 1970s: word processing is just one obvious application. You are over-looking the thousands of unique uses people found for computers at a personal level. That may be, but it didn't stop millions of computers being sold to home users throughout the 1980s. Regardless of what the market was then compared to now (which is a useless comparison) the fact is that people bought computers for the home and used them, whether it was for games or not. And guess what? I'd guess that the same percentage of people who buy computers for their home today as did in the 1980s do so for playing games. That's just plain wrong. It was obvious from the moment the Altair 8800 hit the pages of Popular Electronics that personal computers were going to be a huge thing. The problem is that the big companies were stuck in their bigness and just didn't get it. Hundreds of companies sprung up in the first years of the microcomputer revolution, all trying to cash in on the craze. These computers were primarily sold to businesses after the inital hobbyist boom, but home users steadily increased over the years and continue to increase to this day. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

Most of the early home computers were sold for games. Most of the software available was games. Most of the early magazines talked about programming, and guess what they were programming, games! Please note, I'm basically ignoring the S-100 bus systems. But even on those, games were a big thing. As for the IBM PC and clones, initially those were more of a office type system, rather than a home computer. Interesting, people didn't program word processors? Strange, I'm sure I'm not the only one on this list that wrote a simple word processing type app for their first computer. As for typewriters, I still have one on my desk at work, I find that a typewriter is still useful, even now. Zane -- -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |

On Tuesday 21 September 2004 22:22, Joseph S. Barrera III wrote: Well, it's much harder to fill out paper forms using a computer and printer (getting spacing right, measuring the form to figure out where fields are, etc). And, I prefer using my Selectric on forms to using a pen and writing it out; my handwriting isn't always that readable. Pat -- Purdue University ITAP/RCS --- http://www.itap.purdue.edu/rcs/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

Patrick Finnegan wrote: Scan the form, load it into your favorite Word Processor or Image Editor as a background image, and type over the top of it. You don't need to worry about alighing the form into the printer just right, or that the feed mechanism will pick it at a slightly different position, etc.

Well, I certainly still use an old manual typewriter for filling in printed forms. A lot easier than convincing a word processor to put things in the right places. -tony

On Tue, 21 Sep 2004, Teo Zenios wrote: play games. A big reason for the techies and nerds was so they could do programming without being constrained by time limits. And what did they programs? GAMES! The Apple ][ was doing all this by the late 1970s. So were many other computers on the market at the time. The user base was limited and the applications were certainly crude, especially compared to today's standards, but people did use these things in the home, and the trend was obviously towards more penetration into the home market for these sorts of applications. If we go back to the original argument by Ken Olsen, which is that there's no reason to have computers in the home, Ken was not only completely wrong, but disastrously wrong, as history has proven. Because today the applications are obvious and evolved, and then there's the Internet. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s people bought computers for the home because they heard they could do all sorts of nifty things with them, and the kids could use them to play games. And people did. You were comparing the market in the late 1970s to the market of today and saying this is evidence that computers had no use in the home, which is just plain wrong. How many cars were sold in the late 1800s and how do those sales numbers compare to today? Furthermore, what does that say about how useful or useless cars were for individuals back then? But computers back then were also targeted at the whole family for pretty much all the applications that we use them for today. Look at any early Apple ad, for example, and you'll see every member of the family represented with an application mentioned for each one (from the obvious to the sexist, i.e. "Mom can save her recipes!"). It was clearly not obvious to IBM that they would be selling in the millions, but it was clear that there was a market, which is all that mattered. As it were, they sold around 35,000 PC's by the end of 1981, five times their expectations. So by 1981, only four years after Ken made his comment, it became very obvious that computers had a huge future. But even before then, sales for personal computers were skyrocketing. IBM only came into the picture after it was obvious they were missing the boat. Ken was obviously, plainly, painfully, and as I said before, disastrously wrong. DEC is gone, Apple is not. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

On Tue, 21 Sep 2004, Teo Zenios wrote: I would disagree. Maybe it was hard for Ken Olsen to dream about this, but certainly not Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Guess who got it right? Apple did. Apple, at least in their advertising, promoted a cavalier attitude towards IBM's entry into the personal computer market. They thought IBM wouldn't gain traction. Other companies of the era felt similarly. They were wrong of course. DEC is gone. Apple is not. Unless you're certain of the demise of Apple in less than 12 years, this statement is not true. -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

Zane> DEC made one big mistake, getting an SOB in as CEO that looted Zane> the company and sold off bits till he was able to sell the Zane> company. Agreed -- but you're not talking about Ken Olsen anymore. paul

Yeah, this is silly. Ken Olsen was a great guy, but he was as human as any of us, and made mistakes. He probably yelled at his dog too. Clearly, DEC missed the boat. I can personally attest to the TOTAL CRAP JOB they did with the Rainbow. (I can't believe I'm making this capitalist argument, I hate its results :-) but it wasn't his place to "predict" the use of computers in the home, but to CREATE it, and DEC had as good a chances as any, though historically the entrenched make poor pioneers (but then there's IBM, so much for consistency). On Tue, 2004-09-21 at 17:21, Vintage Computer Festival wrote: