Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
> No doubt The people at Amazon.com hope that their competitors all think
> like you.
I'm not a competitor, I'm an E-book customer.
I am not even an e-book customer. I was just amused remembering the
"toy" comment years ago. The thing is: those experts were right. The
early personal computers were useless toys. But they were rapidly
developed into practical machines.
I think the book publishers and newspapers have the message. They are
not downplaying the seriousness of the competition from Kindle, even
though there are only a half-million or so Kindles out there.
Newspapers are dire condition anyway, I believe mainly because of the
loss of classified advertising to Craigslist.com. A newspaper is
defined as advertising with news printed on the back, and the bread
and butter of a newspaper is the local classified advertising. The
market for that is evaporating.
When did the big break come, anyway -- Apple ][, I think, right? And as
I recall it had a lot more than 4 kB.
I was using Trash-80s (Radio Shack TRS-80) and some other Zilog Z80
machines until the IBM PC came along. They had 4 to 16 kB. No useful
video capabilities, but I did not need them.
Mainly I used Data General minicomputers, which were beautiful
things. Elegant and spare, and more reliable (at least in my memory)
than today's personal computer. IBM considered using the Data General
Nova operating system for their PC instead of Microsoft's DOS. If
only they had!! We would have saved millions of man hours wasted by
programmers and computer users struggling with an inadequate,
unreliable operating system. Adding a Windows-style interface to Nova
DOS would have been easy, and crash-proof. A small extra investment
up front at the dawn of a new technology can have a profound impact
on the later development.
And in fact I also knew one of the "killer apps" very well, as we
wrote it: Visicalc, the first spreadsheet program, made the A][ an
overnight necessity in an awful lot of offices.
That's right.
The early history of personal computers is well documented in an
amusing book by Robert Cringley, "Accidental Empires." As I recall,
he wrote that people were showing up at computer stores asking for
"that spreadsheet machine." That's how they thought of it.
- Jed
