A nifty demo

From: Hans Franke <Hans.Franke_at_mch20.sbs.de>
Date: Mon Dec 14 07:07:10 1998

> > > The moral of the story is that it's relatively easy to give a good demo,
> > > slightly harder to do a real implementation, and then very hard to get
> > > market acceptance and penetration for new ideas.

> > Thats one thing, the other is how superior design (soft
> > and hardware) can be dumped in favour of crapy PCs.
> > Back in the late 70s and early 80s we had at SIEMENS a
> > network of EMS 5800 systems - OEM versions of the Xerox
> > Star - all over Germany and most European dependances.
> > Of course not every Employee had one, since including a
> > laser priter it was some 100,000 Mark value, but at least
> > most departments that needed to.

> There were a bunch of 'em (Xerox Star) at Siemens Princeton in
> 1985 when I was maintaining the DEC stuff there.
> Nice stuff, great WSYWIC, lousy maintenance problems with the
> hardware and software though.

So they have send them back to the US ? Or did they
use 'original' Stars ?

> > And in my opinion no PC (no Win, no MacOS and no Next)
> > has catched up with the Star - and it's more than 20
> > years later !

> Yup. I did get to see them and Ventura Publisher and there
> seemed to be some similarity. Did Ventura start with ex-Star
> folks?

I think they have been insirated by the Star like anyone
else, but the Ventura design is more to the direction
of a single programm and of course made to fit GEM (or
did DR made GEM to fit the Publisher ?). GEM itself
was like the Mac a downsized (and crushed) version of
the Star (I still belive all 'modern' GUI systems are
just the mouse interface but noone took the desktop :( ).
Maybe with an exception of the OS/2 desktop (Althrough
still a GUI, it includes a lot more OO than most other).


> > BTW: Xerox' quality was just junk - from 10 systems
> > delivered to Witten (the SIEMENS plant where they
> > where configured and repacked) only 5 worked properly,
> > and 3 more could be reassembled from the five non
> > working. Like in the SU - 10 tractors delivered to
> > a farm coop and the farmers had to change parts
> > until at least 5 of them worked .... :)

> They got real slipshod for a while, even on the copiers.
> They lost a lot of that business to Kodak (who took over -- I think--
> the IBM copilers).

> Both DEC and Bell Labs ran those Kodak beasts and you could copy a whole
> library on 'em without problems. Ask me about my CP/M doc set 8-).

Jep, and I still praise our Agfa copier - once I spend a
whole weekend beside it to copy Apple manuals - one page
at a time - no autofeeder - it was 1979 :)

Gruss
Hans

--
Ich denke, also bin ich, also gut
HRK
Received on Mon Dec 14 1998 - 07:07:10 GMT

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