🚀 go-pugleaf

On 01/08/2018 21:51, Michael Black wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Aug 2018, hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
> 
> 
>>> There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.
>>> - Kenneth H. Olsen, founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation
>>
>> I don't know (if) or when that was said, but by the early 1960s,
>> home computers (actually a terminal connected to a super mainframe)
>> were definitely a hot topic.
>>
> But that was about selling home users timesharing.
> 
> It may actually be the same thing, an expectation of centralized 
> computers taking care of everyone, instead of a whole lot of computers.
> 

I think its a totally failure of folks in "industry" to follow up 
trends. So DEC made its money by being smaller and nimbler than IBM or 
more generally "the BUNCH". The trouble is that they continued to focus 
on the BUNCH and large computers while neglecting to observe that 
smaller manufacturers were doing to them what they had done to the large 
machines.

This happens all the time. Look SUN, Prime, DataGeneral and to some 
extent HP...

Dave



> Realistically, some of the early dismissal comes from the size and cost 
> of computers,  initially few would be able to pay for them, let alone 
> find a place for them.  But they were also probably blinded, unable to 
> see a potential, maybe again because of the size and cost.
> 
> But once timesharing took off, there's little difference between 
> offering it to a business and offering it to a home.  Cost factors in, 
> but someone would have designed a cheaper Teletype machine, or even a 
> non-mechanical terminal, and once you had the wider pool of consumers to 
> draw from, you might make up in quantity what you lost in lower fees per 
> user.
> 
> Even in the internet age, lots of ISPs offered "unlimited" useage after 
> a while, and always fine print meaning "you can't connect all the time". 
> LIke gym membership, they were selling something with an expectation 
> that useage for many would be relatively low, so they get the money but 
> didn't have to meet peak demands because relatively few would draw the 
> peaks.
> 
> Things got cheaper becasue demand went up, which in turn allowed 
> manufacturing costs to go down, which then brought in more conusmers.  
> IN the early days, who could imagine the future?  I have a quad core 
> 3.4GHz computer with 8gigs of RAM and a 500gig hard drive, and most of 
> the time it sits idle.  It was refurbished two years ago, I paid $351.  
> Way better than those early mainframes, who could have imagined?
> 
>    Michael
>