[HN Gopher] Tarbell to Cromemco
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Tarbell to Cromemco
Author : kencausey
Score : 21 points
Date : 2024-01-23 15:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.os2museum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.os2museum.com)
| TMWNN wrote:
| Ah, Cromemco. One of the many, many computer companies whose
| lights burned so brightly c. 1981, but would be totally trampled
| by the IBM PC elephant.
|
| And it's not like Cromemco, Godbout, Morrow, et al. didn't know
| that 16-bit was the future. They released 8088/8086-based
| computers too. The offerings were not, however, IBM PC-
| compatible.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| The DEC Rainbow and the NEC APC also offered the "MS-DOS but
| not IBM PC compatible" experience.
|
| The Rainbow might have had a chance if it had beaten the IBM PC
| to market, but personal computing might have gone in an
| entirely different direction if they hadn't dismissed home
| computers in 1975.
|
| I'm not so sure how the NEC would have fared, given its 8"
| floppy drives. Those were already going out of style by 1981.
| TMWNN wrote:
| In an alternate world DEC would have released the VT180
| computer expansion with the VT100 in 1978, or soon afterward.
| The VT100 was a huge hit in and of itself; customers having
| the option to expand the terminal to a "real" CP/M computer,
| or buy the VT100+VT180 together, could have completely taken
| out Cromemco/Godbout/Morrow/IMSAI/Vector, and much of what
| drove demand for TRS-80. (Apple would have taken a hit, too,
| but would have survived thanks to VisiCalc.) DEC was a known
| quantity; these new startups weren't.
|
| ... But that would never have happened, because:
|
| * DEC in 1978 would, as you said, not have been interested in
| personal computers.
|
| * Further, DEC in 1978 would never have released a computer
| running a non-DEC operating system. Customers running Unix on
| PDP-11 was bad enough. It might have tried to squeeze the
| PDP-11 into a very compact form factor, as happened with the
| Heath H11, but that means running RT-11.
|
| * Finally, much of what drove Cromemco/Godbout/Morrow/etc.'s
| sales was the VAR/SI market that quickly emerged _because_
| they, as startups, did not have existing field sales /service
| operations. I don't know how suited DEC's sales force would
| have been for selling to the small businesses that bought
| turnkey accounting/financial systems from VARs. Word
| processing was an existing market, but I think the customers
| that bought DEC WP-8 were larger than those that bought
| WordStar CP/M systems through VARs.
|
| DEC wasn't alone in this. The _only_ large technology company
| that released a CP /M computer before the IBM PC was Xerox,
| and the 820 came out just one month before the PC. Even Tandy
| went with the horrible TRSDOS when it could have also sewn up
| the CP/M market by going with the latter in 1977, instead of
| intentionally making the TRS-80 incompatible with CP/M out of
| the box.
|
| 40 years later, the list of things that IBM did right with
| the PC still amazes, especially considering how many things
| all of its rivals did wrong (and all the things IBM did wrong
| after Don Estridge's death in 1985).
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Cromemco also had a 68K line and their own UNIX-alike, CROMIX,
| which even ran on the Z80! I've got a System Three with 68K
| setup, a mining and minerals exploration company in West
| Virginia was using it, running CROMIX on 8" hard disk, to
| manage their business.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Interesting to see something that definitely used the Tarbell
| double-density controller! That's a pretty rare controller, and
| one for which I have not found a lot of extant bootable
| media/disk images.
|
| The single-density Tarbell controller was ubiquitous and common
| and sort of set the standard for 8" floppy controllers on S-100.
| Reliable as a hammer.
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