[HN Gopher] Rewriting the History of Computing
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       Rewriting the History of Computing
        
       Author : AlbertCory
       Score  : 9 points
       Date   : 2021-11-11 15:31 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.albertcory.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.albertcory.io)
        
       | YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
       | The title seems a little off. The article is retelling the
       | history of Sillicon Valley technology companies, not "computing"
       | (for example, the article has nothing to do with the theory of
       | computation, Kurt Godel, Alan Turing, Alonzo Church etc).
        
       | AlbertCory wrote:
       | Although the book has a strict no-hindsight rule, because it's a
       | novel, I also have a section "Let's DO have hindsight" [1] where
       | Jerry Morrison and I look at the counterfactual: what _should_
       | they have done?
       | 
       | My conclusion is that anything Xerox _as a corporation_ did would
       | have turned out as badly as the IBM PC did. Middle management
       | screws everything up.
       | 
       | So then the question is: what _else_ could they have done? In
       | fact, PARC did spin off some companies which turned out quite
       | well -- in one case, ending up with a larger market cap than
       | Xerox itself.
       | 
       | Jerry looks at it more as a process issue: Waterfall was the only
       | respectable business school methodology then, and that's what
       | they tried to do. It was a colossal misfit for a product like
       | Star.
       | 
       | [1] https://www.albertcory.io/lets-do-have-hindsight
        
       | AlbertCory wrote:
       | Xerox vs. Apple - what _should_ Xerox have done?
       | 
       | By the way, almost everything you think you know about the Steve
       | Jobs visit to PARC is wrong.
        
       | trebligdivad wrote:
       | The thing about the AMD bitslice having too little memory seems
       | odd. The Three Rivers/ICL Perq ran them with a few MB of RAM;
       | they do seem to have been the way to do things just before the
       | micro era.
        
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       (page generated 2021-11-12 23:02 UTC)