Subj : Re: Halt and Catch Fire
To   : poindexter FORTRAN
From : Moondog
Date : Fri May 06 2022 11:23:00

  Re: Re: Halt and Catch Fire
  By: poindexter FORTRAN to Moondog on Wed May 04 2022 07:10 am

 > -=> Moondog wrote to Kaelon <=-
 > 
 >  Mo> A company killing off their own development is different than external
 >  Mo> investors suppressing technology.  Xerox is a good example of a company
 >  Mo> killing a good idea because of cost due to the technology available.
 >  Mo> In 1973 they create the Palo Alto Research Center to research the
 >  Mo> possibilies of a paperless office.
 > 
 >  Maybe they let their project fail because their business model
 >  revolved around TRILLIONS OF PIECES OF PAPER?
 > 
 >  Mo> The upper managment was short sighted and seen it as an
 >  Mo> exercise in spending money.  After all, they were a copier/ imagin
 >  Mo> company.  Why interfere with their paper driven businesses?
 > 
 >  :)
 > 
 >  I think of the stories of Steve Wozniak approaching his employer
 >  (Hewlett Packard) to notify them that he'd created the Apple while
 >  under a work product agreement and HP had first right to his IP. They
 >  passed on it.
 > 
 > 
 > 
 > 
 > 
 > 
 > ... Go outside. Shut the door.

Xerox passed on several technologies that came from Xerox PARC. hard to
imagine several of the eveyday technologies we enjoy were solid concepts 50
years ago.  

Check out Doug Engelbart's Mother of all Demos on Youtube from
1968.  The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete
computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more
commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time
many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows,
hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video
conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking,
revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor. Engelbart's
presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a
single system.

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