Fumbling the Future.....

This is a small review of a book that tells the story of how Xerox, having just invented the personal computer in the 1970's could see no use for it and gave it away to a new company called Apple or at least the many new features Xerox had developed for it. I liked the story becuase it reminded me of the goose that laid the golden egg and the reasons why Xerox killed it. I had to ask myself what would I ahve done if I was a manager at Xerox. i mean they had the prize and it took Steve Jobs to realize what the new Xerox PC meant. and they are still kicking themselves today over their big blunder.

I suspect there are countless similar stories in the business world, everyone always looks back at what
could have been. To make it more painful, Steve Jobs was not exactly Mr. Nice Guy if a person believes what
has been written about him ...... but that probably happens more often than not as well. Nice guys are
supposed to finish last as they say.

Kodak invented the digital camera.

As I heard it years ago, the economy was bad at the time and there were many computer PhD's looking for work; Xerox set up Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), hired a bunch and let them do whatever they wanted. Most of them had no interest in business, they were just waiting until a professorship opened up somewhere. I don't think Xerox invented the personal computer, they were trying to play catch-up but never really knew what they wanted to do with it.

Jobs toured the facility and saw the potential of what they'd done and took it back to Apple. Xerox didn't give it away, Jobs just used their ideas. As the economy picked the PARC researchers moved on and PARC faded away.

Sears owned the mail order business when the Amazon was still a river.

Sears and Amazon was exactly what was going through my mind while I was reading the OP.

There is some truth in saying it like that, but the reality was far
muddier.

In my first job out of college as IT director at South Plains College in
1984, the school already had quite a few Commodore Pet PC
computers.

Since at the time no one knew which operating system would win
going forward, including me, as we bought some new PCs, I bought
some DEC Rainbows - which had BOTH Z80 chips on the
motherboard to run CPM and Intel 8088 chips for MSDOS
compatibility.

Back then, the secretaries still loved their Pets, and I had trouble
getting them to use the newer DECs, while DEC (who at the time
was the 1800 pound gorilla in the minicomputer world and could very
easily have parlayed that into PC dominance) wound up going down
the drain and being bought up by Compaq.

I couldn?t even get our DEC sales rep to ever call me back for our
measly tens of thousands of $s orders because he was so
preoccupied with his millions of $s accounts. He was a real ball of
fire and helpful once I could get to him, but he was like a multi million
$ rock star or something he was so in demand.

So there were quite a few other players that fought and died in that
early arena.

A lot like some of the obscure early tractor manufacturers in our
hobby of old iron.



Howard

Check out the "homebrew computer club".
homebrew computer club

Yes, way back in 1975 or 76. Actually took pretty decent pictures. Everyone kept saying who the heck wants to ues a computer to look at their pictures? Here are some 4x6 pictures in an envelope from the drug store. The patten finally ran out and away we go. Trying to remember if Olympus was the first digital. Crude thing. The only memory was in the camera and you had to keep downloading it into a regular desktop. You can't beleive how low of resolution that thing could be set on to save memory space. I have a photo from 1976 of me and the x at a ren fair. Looks like fred flintstone carved it.

I am getting brain freeze. Read the reply twice and still wrong. Picture was from 1987. Thats better.

One very important technology that enabled the Internet and connecting computers together was by Bob Metcalfe inventor of Ethernet
in 1973 while at Xerox PARC.
If it wasn't for his invention we would not communicating on the Internet with or PCs, laptops, tablets and smart phones.

JimB2

I used to work for "X rock" back in the 80s. Worked on a bunch of stuff and played with the typewriter systems and the printers too. That Daisey wheel was out of the Diablo group. You could get a bunch of different print styles and they just snapped in. There were more things they FUBARED just like Kodak. Another , if you remember AMPEX? At one time I had an Ampex reel to reel. Sold it to a friend. Darn. Anyway they are the company who invented a cartridge type video system. YES FOLKS they invented what would be come the VHS tape recorder. Sold what they thought a worthless patten to JVC in Japan. We all know how that turns out. The Sony corp countered with the BETA system. Far better quality but only ran one hour tapes. They also wouldn't lease any manufacturing rights. Do you remember the British computer company with the little personal computer? Sinclair. Had a Membrane key board. Yuk

What is a patten?

Ok Patent.

Don't forget Edison, Henry Ford, Walt Disney just to name a few more. Edison was no dummy but he basically stole the brain power from his employees and claimed everything. If Nikola Tesla could of had freedom instead of edison trying to screw him and Westinghouse at every corner. Henry Ford was a real old school tight wad. Walt Disney was almost a Roman class slave driver. Just stories and what you read folks.

Then there's the story of Hedy Lamar, a Hollywood actress during the 30s and 40s, and often considered the 'world's most beautiful woman'.
But there was a brain beneath her lovely hair, and she found refuge from the shallowness of show biz by analyzing and inventing. As World
War II began in Europe, she began to wonder why torpedoes could not be equipped with directional devices controlled by radio signals. The
reason given was that the radio signal could easily be jammed by the enemy. She began to concentrate on how to make radio signals "un-
jammable", and she devised the notion that guidance instructions could be sent to torpedoes in short bursts of data spread over multiple
frequencies. Called 'frequency hopping', it would prevent the enemy from interfering with the many different signals.

Lamar got a patent for the concept and then offered it to the U.S. Navy. The mossbacks there scoffed and basically told the 'little lady'
to go back to Hollywood and pose for glamour shots. She forgot about it. When her patent expired another patent hound found it and saw its
merit. The idea was dusted off and refined and now is the technological basis for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. She was finally recognized
for her work in 1997, by the Electronics Frontier Foundation. She never made a dime off of it.

I've heard it said if we would have followed Tesla instead of Edison, we would have had cell phones in the 1930's.

My recollection is that Xerox did not invent the Personal
Computer, but they did invent the prototype input device that
was the ?mouse?. That?s what Steve Jobs took to Apple; to be
adapted for the first Macintosh computer.

Same deal with Nikola Tesla. He had MILLIONS of dollars worth of patents with Westinghouse. He ripped them and told Westinghouse to make the world better. This was during the twentys if correct. He basically died pennyless in a hotel where he lived his final days into WWII. He was way way too intelligent to be a human being bet he was an alien from another planet. Watch men in black. ELVIS didn't die, he just went home.

I think it is more unusual for a large
corporation to be able to change with the
times than not.

A quote I heard a little while back, "if
you have a VP of innovation, you dont."

Well, had that happened Phil, mankind might not be on the planet right now. Not sure where we're heading but a lot of stuff scares me.

Remember Archie McCardel was from Zerox when he went to run International Harvester down the path of failure.

(quoted from post at 15:49:23 05/25/18) I used to work for "X rock" back in the 80s. Worked on a bunch of stuff and played with the typewriter systems and the printers too. That Daisey wheel was out of the Diablo group. You could get a bunch of different print styles and they just snapped in. There were more things they FUBARED just like Kodak. Another , if you remember AMPEX? At one time I had an Ampex reel to reel. Sold it to a friend. Darn. Anyway they are the company who invented a cartridge type video system. YES FOLKS they invented what would be come the VHS tape recorder. Sold what they thought a worthless patten to JVC in Japan. We all know how that turns out. The Sony corp countered with the BETA system. Far better quality but only ran one hour tapes. They also wouldn't lease any manufacturing rights. Do you remember the British computer company with the little personal computer? Sinclair. Had a Membrane key board. Yuk

Click to expand...

In response to the Sinclair, if it's the same one I learned on (OK, kinda learned on), it was made by Timex, or at least had the brand name on it. It had all of 2 kilobytes of RAM, 3 1/4 MHz CPU, the membrane keyboard(worthless), and wasn't any bigger than a desktop calculator...and about as useful. Don't think it was color capable on the graphics either.
This was back in the early 80s, and they cost about $100 +or-.
For about the same money, one could buy a Commodore Vic 20, or for a couple hundred more a C64 and have much more 'puter either way.
Apple were pretty popular in the schools but were quite expensive for most folk ($1000+ IIRC).
Anyways I'll end my ramble here.

(quoted from post at 17:01:48 05/25/18) As I heard it years ago, the economy was bad at the time and there were many computer PhD's looking for work; Xerox set up Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), hired a bunch and let them do whatever they wanted. Most of them had no interest in business, they were just waiting until a professorship opened up somewhere. I don't think Xerox invented the personal computer, they were trying to play catch-up but never really knew what they wanted to do with it.

Jobs toured the facility and saw the potential of what they'd done and took it back to Apple. Xerox didn't give it away, Jobs just used their ideas. As the economy picked the PARC researchers moved on and PARC faded away.

Click to expand...

yes... and they invented the mouse as we know it. They wanted to """own the desktop""" so did tons of research there. Then the ceo pulled the plug and abandoned it. PARC invented much of the modern computer systems that we know today. They partnered back then with DEC and INTEL. They invented the the nic card, Ethernet, Ethernet hubs, and many other systems. DEC ended up with DEC net.. the early Ethernet. Three of the engineers afterwards went on the form 3COM to become multi, multi millionaires. Apple grabbed on to the mouse and brought it to popularity. Up till then it was only terminals wired to a mainframe limited to 200 feet otherwise it was a modem. This allowed terminals ALL over the building, and dec's terminal servers could be ran remove so you could now extend mainframe services to other buildings, thus the mainframe was available campus wide... via the early Ethernet, and terminal servers. All developed because Zerox decided to research everything you needed to do... to run an office, terminal, printers, and copiers. A LOT of companies took off from this work. The early muti-pin connector was called a "DIX" connector.. from DEC-INTEL-Xerox. Later the connector was renamed AUI connector via the standardization committees. This connector was used for all connections from computers to Ethernet in the days of vampire clamps, thick coax, later thin coax, later the 3030 plastic "fiber" then on to twisted pair with the early 3com pair-tamer balun products that used twisted pair substitution for thin coax. All of the internet revolution owes its start to PARC, and ARPA, an amazing story of revolutionary development.