First Internet message and ...

[Fred Cisin]

Good point.

Some companies that COULD HAVE been the leaders made great inventions 
and/or engineering, and then fumbled the marketing.

I'm thinking that Xerox Parc could be said to have "invented" the next 
generation of personal computers, but did they ever cash in on that?
I can visualize a Apple/Microsoft argument, "But we stole it FIRST!"
(like English/French/Spanish in America)


On Tue, 26 Nov 2019, Chris Zach via cctalk wrote:

> I would make a strong argument that DEC invented the PC: Twice actually. The 
> PDT11/150 is a pretty amazing system: 64k of memory, serial port, printer 
> port, RT11 operating system and if I recall correctly someone wrote a version 
> of Visicalc and a nice word processor on it as a demonstration.
>
> Unfortunately Dec saw that such a system would cannibalize their sales of 
> pdp11 computers and sold the damn thing as a communication controller. Sad 
> beyond belief.
>
> They did it again with the Pro/350: A system that had integrated graphics, 
> 512k of memory, dual floppies and a hard disk, easy to install card options 
> (Ethernet, TMS, etc) and of course a real time multi-program operating system 
> and (with Synergy) a fairly neat GUI.
>
> Unfortunately Dec saw that such a system would cannibalize their sales of pdp 
> and vax computers and crippled the living daylights out of it. Ultimately 
> selling it as a front-end processor. Sad beyond belief.
>
> It wasn't just having the technology, it was having it and knowing how to 
> market it. You need both to make a good product and DEC really was all about 
> protecting their current market share (which is insane as they came to be by 
> exploiting a niche in the computer industry).
>
> Oh well.
>
> CZ