OK, so some engineers and technical people did expect a pretty large volume of PC sales. Too bad you did not act on your assumption or you might be another of the billionaires on record. I would guess that you may have thought that the volume would be enormous, but were not sure. Many of us are in that camp.
I was in the radio communications world at the time and stood by watching as these machines took over. I would hate to make the same mistake when LENR takes off. We are both on record expecting these devices to become incredibly important and widespread in the near future. I hope to invest at the right time if I can only determine where. I agree, the wondrous advancement in hard drive technology as well as device speed and power consumption made a lot of difference. I still have an old ATT computer to stare at that had a hard drive that would not even hold one modern program. The darn thing cost twice as much as a new one today that is millions of times more powerful. But the old boy did some useful work. I used that old ATT upstairs to design the first practical EAS receiver device that now is seen everywhere (Ultramax). My model matched the actual operation to a remarkable degree and made the company I was working with very wealthy. I have noticed that large companies tend to suppress innovation, particularly when it involves significant risk of capital. The brave engineers are usually clamoring to move forward only to be punished by management that is afraid of change. I found myself in that position on many occasions and when we overcame the inertia we generated many successful products. I could go on for a long time on this subject, but will only mention one more. I was in technical charge of a large group that designed all of the receivers and synthesizers for a company that wanted to keep their second market position because it was safer and less expensive. The large company in the field designed a new radio that had very good specifications and performance. The internal product planning group was lagging behind as usual before the new requirements were given to engineering. In my frustration, I just handed a manual of that new product to one of my new engineers who was ready to begin his work and told him to make one like that. To this day he teases me about this but the specifications were exactly the same. Working for startups has great rewards as well as risks. Working for established large companies has less of both. Dave -----Original Message----- From: Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> To: vortex-l <vortex-l@eskimo.com> Sent: Wed, Aug 8, 2012 4:55 pm Subject: Re: [Vo]:Financial Gurus and the Apple Effect David Roberson <dlrober...@aol.com> wrote: I rather suspect that HP did not think that they could make a major profit in this new field. That is somewhat true . . . but they were not stupid. They later jumped in in plenty of time to make money. The early history of microcomputers is well documented. You can learn what they said, and did. No one estimated the future potential of small computers at that time. That is incorrect. I know of at least three people who did: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and me. Okay, there were thousands of others. Seriously, the rapid increase in sales did not surprise me a bit. Only two things have surprised me about the development of small computers: 1. The tremendous increase in the size of hard disks. The price/performance has improved much more than microprocessors or Internet bandwidth. NHK recently reported that there are now more bytes of data recorded than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of earth. That's astounding! 2. The lack of progress in operating system software. Windows is not much better than Data General RDOS, circa 1980. A modern laptop is nothing but at minicomputer with a bag on it, and I don't mean that in a good way. In the book I wrote: "A personal computer is essentially a 1979 minicomputer with a flashy but unreliable operating system grafted onto it. Programmers in 1979 were able to master personal computers in a few hours, and to this day personal computers have no functions or capabilities that would baffle a programmer from that era." A "programmer from that era" meaning myself, obviously. That is not quite true. I am impressed by voice input. I am astounded by robotics such as Google's self-driving automobile, and the Mars Curiosity rover. That stuff, by golly, makes you realize this is the 21st century. - Jed
