Subj : Re: Halt and Catch Fire
To   : poindexter FORTRAN
From : Moondog
Date : Fri May 13 2022 14:02:00

  Re: Re: Halt and Catch Fire
  By: poindexter FORTRAN to Moondog on Wed May 11 2022 06:53 am

 > -=> Moondog wrote to Nightfox <=-
 > 
 >  Mo> It use dto air on the local PBS station back in the mid yo late 80's.
 >  Mo> I recall one where they had two companies reviewing their product, and
 >  Mo> the Korean based firm's sales rep said they were experimenting with
 >  Mo> joining severa l lcd panels to form larger panels.
 > 
 >  Gary Kildall, the co-host with the beard, is the guy who famously
 >  missed an appointment with IBM and missed the opportunity to
 >  sell CPM/86 to them for the IBM PC.
 > 
 >  If memory serves, one of our local affiliates in the San Francisco
 >  Bay Area produced the show. I love seeing balding nerds with wire-rim
 >  prescription glasses in white starched shirts and tie-pins talking
 >  about microprocessors, micro-floppies and more effective data
 >  processing, reminds me of where IT came from. In Halt and Catch Fire,
 >  when Joe goes to work for his girlfriend's dad's company in season 2,
 >  it wasn't that far off.
 > 
 >  One of the episodes of Computer Chronicles was at CoffeeNet, an
 >  internet cafe before coffee shops knew what Linux or Wifi was. I
 >  remember seeing it back in the late '90s.
 > 
 >  I don't know if they ever covered SFNet, a multi-node dial-up BBS in
 >  San Francisco that had coin-op kiosks in coffee shops and
 >  laundromats. They did a lot to bring non-computer people into the
 >  community, especially when a lot of people didn't have home computers
 >  yet.
 > 
 > 
 > 
 > 
 > 
 > 
 >    Before then LCD
 >  Mo> panels were long, slender panels cpable of maybe 80x10 rows.  The sales
 >  Mo> guy was estatic, sying active matrix color was right around the corner,
 >  Mo> and large high definition TV's will put CRT's out of business.  The
 >  Mo> other sales guy laughed, and stated a bunch of stats about viewing
 >  Mo> angle, latency in twist rate of the crystals, and the computing power
 >  Mo> needed to multiplex all these little panels into one larger one.  The
 >  Mo> slaes guy form the Korean company made a remark about a difference in
 >  Mo> US and Asian engineering investment.  The main difference was regarding
 >  Mo> time span before maturity versus price.  Us firms were looking at 3-5
 >  Mo> years maturity versus what was possible in 10+ years. 
 >  Mo> ---
 >  Mo>    Synchronet   The Cave BBS - Since 1992 - cavebbs.homeip.net
 > 
 > ... Is it finished?

Look up the Gary Kildall special of Computer chronicles either on Youtube or
Archive.org.  Associates of Gary say their meetings with IBM went
differently.  Bill Gates already had his foot in the door when he was
consulted to help write the IBM BIOS.  He knew alot of things he shouldn't
have known as a competitor going in to bid on selling an operating system.

Kildall would pitch his companie's products when possible on the show.  He
produced a graphics enivronment manager called GEM.  It was his take on the
Apple windowed OS and would run on 512k while  Windows required over 640k.

---
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