The History of Computing

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate (and sometimes cope with) the future! Today we’re going to look at an often forgotten period in the history of computers. The world before DOS. 

I’ve been putting off telling the story of CP/M. But it’s time. Picture this: It’s 1974. It’s the end of the Watergate scandal. The oil crisis. The energy crisis. Stephen King’s first book Carrie is released. The Dolphins demolish my Minnesota Vikings 24-7 in the Super Bowl. Patty Hearst is kidnapped. The Oakland As win the World Series. Muhammad Ali pops George Forman in the grill to win the Heavyweight title. Charles de Gaulle opens in Paris. The Terracotta Army is discovered in China. And in one of the most telling shifts that we were moving from the 60s into the mid-70s, the Volkswagen Golf replaces the Beetle. I mean, the Hippies shifted to Paul Anka, Paper Lace, and John Denver. The world was settling down.

And the world was getting ready for something to happen. A lot of people might not have known it yet, but the Intel 8080 series of chips was about to change the world. Gary Kildall could see it. He’d bought the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004 when it came out in 1971. He’d been enamored and consulted with Intel. He finished his doctorate in computer science and went tot he Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey to teach and developed Kildall’s Method, to optimize compilers. But then he met the 8080 chip. 

The Intel Intellec-8 was an early computer that he wanted to get an operating system running on. He’d written PL/M or the Programming Language for Microcomputers and he would write the CP/M operating system, short for Control Program/Monitor, loosely based on TOPS-10, the OS that ran on his DECsystem-10 mainframe. 

He would license PL/M through Intel but operating systems weren’t really a thing just yet. By 1977, personal computers were on the rise and he would take it to market though calling the company Digital Research, Inc. His wife Dorothy ran the company. 

And they would go into a nice rise in sales. 250,000 licenses in 3 years. This was the first time consumers could interact with computer hardware in a standardized fashion across multiple systems. They would port the code to the Z80 processors, people would run CP/M on Apple Its, Altair’s, IMSaI, Kaypro, Epson, Osbourne, Commodore and even the trash 80, or TRS-80. The world was hectic and not that standard, but there were really 3 main chips so the software actually ran on 3,000 models during an explosion in personal computer hobbyists. 

CP/M quickly rose and became the top operating system on the market. We would get WordStar, dBase, VisiCalc, MultiPlan, SuperCalc, Delphi, and Turbo Pascal for the office. And for fun, we’d get Colossal Cave Adventure, Gorillas, and Zork. 

It bootstrapped from floppy disks. They made $5 million bucks in 1981. Almost like cocoaine money at the time. Gary got a private airplane. And John Opel from IBM called. Bill Gates told him to. IBM wanted to buy the rights to CP/M. Digital Research and IBM couldn’t come to terms. And this is where it gets tricky. IBM was going to make CP/M the standard operating system for the IBM PC. Microsoft jumped on the opportunity and found a tool called 86-DOS from a company called Seattle Computer Products. The cool thing there is that used the CP/M Api and so would be easy to have compatible software. Paul Allen worked with them to license the software then compiled it for the IBM. This was the first MS DOS and became the standard, branded as PC DOS for IBM. 

Later, Kildall agreed to sell CP/M for $240 on the IBM PCs. The problem was that PC DOS came in at $40. If you knew nothing about operating systems, which would you buy? And so even though it had compatibility with the CP/M API, PC DOS really became the standard. So much so that Digital Research would clone the Microsoft DOS and release their own DR DOS. Kildall would later describe Bill Gates using the following quote: "He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry.” While Kildall considered DOS theft, he was told not to sue because the laws simply weren’t yet clear. 

At first though, it didn’t seem to hurt. Digital Research continued to grow. By 1983 computers were booming. Digital Research would hit $45 million in sales. They had gone from just Gary to 530 employees by then. Gangbusters. Although they did notice that they missed the mark on the 8088 chips from Intel and even with massive rises in sales had lost market share to Unix System V and all the variants that would come from that. CP/M would add DOS emulation. 

But sales began to slip. The IBM 5150 and subsequent machines just took over the market. And CP/M, once a dominant player, would be left behind. Gary would move more into research and development but by 1985 resigned as the CEO of Digital Research, in a year where they laid off 200 employees. 

He helped start a show called the Computer Chronicles in 1983. It has been something I’ve been watching a lot recently, researching these episodes and it’s awesome! He was a kinda and wicked smart man. Even to people who had screwed him over. 

As many would after them, Digital Research went into long-term legal drama, involving the US Department of Justice. But none of that saved them. And it wouldn’t save any of the other companies that went there either. Digital Research would sell to Novell for $80 million in 1991 and various parts of the intellectual property would live on with compilers, interpreters, and DR DOS living on. For example, as Caldera OpenDOS. But CP/M itself would be done.  

Kildall would die in a bar in Monterey, California in 1994. One of the pioneers of the personal computer market. From CP/M to disk buffering the data structure that made the CD, he was all over the place in personal computers. And CP/M was the gold standard of operating systems for a few years. 

One of the reasons I put this episode off is because I didn’t know how I would end it. Like, what’s the story here. I think it’s mostly that I’ve heard it said that he could have been Bill Gates. I think that’s a drastic oversimplification. CP/M could have been the operating system on the PC. But a lot of other things could have happened as well. He was wealthy, just not Bill Gates level wealthy. And rather than go into a downward spiral over what we don’t have, maybe we should all be happy with what we have. 

And much of his technology survived for decades to come. So he left behind a family and a legacy. In uncertain times, focus on the good and do well with it. And thank you for being you. And for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. 

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us to innovate (and sometimes cope with) the future! Today we’re going to look at an often forgotten period in the history of computers. The world before DOS. 

I’ve been putting off telling the story of CP/M. But it’s time. Picture this: It’s 1974. It’s the end of the Watergate scandal. The oil crisis. The energy crisis. Stephen King’s first book Carrie is released. The Dolphins demolish my Minnesota Vikings 24-7 in the Super Bowl. Patty Hearst is kidnapped. The Oakland As win the World Series. Muhammad Ali pops George Forman in the grill to win the Heavyweight title. Charles de Gaulle opens in Paris. The Terracotta Army is discovered in China. And in one of the most telling shifts that we were moving from the 60s into the mid-70s, the Volkswagen Golf replaces the Beetle. I mean, the Hippies shifted to Paul Anka, Paper Lace, and John Denver. The world was settling down.

And the world was getting ready for something to happen. A lot of people might not have known it yet, but the Intel 8080 series of chips was about to change the world. Gary Kildall could see it. He’d bought the first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004 when it came out in 1971. He’d been enamored and consulted with Intel. He finished his doctorate in computer science and went tot he Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey to teach and developed Kildall’s Method, to optimize compilers. But then he met the 8080 chip. 

The Intel Intellec-8 was an early computer that he wanted to get an operating system running on. He’d written PL/M or the Programming Language for Microcomputers and he would write the CP/M operating system, short for Control Program/Monitor, loosely based on TOPS-10, the OS that ran on his DECsystem-10 mainframe. 

He would license PL/M through Intel but operating systems weren’t really a thing just yet. By 1977, personal computers were on the rise and he would take it to market though calling the company Digital Research, Inc. His wife Dorothy ran the company. 

And they would go into a nice rise in sales. 250,000 licenses in 3 years. This was the first time consumers could interact with computer hardware in a standardized fashion across multiple systems. They would port the code to the Z80 processors, people would run CP/M on Apple Its, Altair’s, IMSaI, Kaypro, Epson, Osbourne, Commodore and even the trash 80, or TRS-80. The world was hectic and not that standard, but there were really 3 main chips so the software actually ran on 3,000 models during an explosion in personal computer hobbyists. 

CP/M quickly rose and became the top operating system on the market. We would get WordStar, dBase, VisiCalc, MultiPlan, SuperCalc, Delphi, and Turbo Pascal for the office. And for fun, we’d get Colossal Cave Adventure, Gorillas, and Zork. 

It bootstrapped from floppy disks. They made $5 million bucks in 1981. Almost like cocoaine money at the time. Gary got a private airplane. And John Opel from IBM called. Bill Gates told him to. IBM wanted to buy the rights to CP/M. Digital Research and IBM couldn’t come to terms. And this is where it gets tricky. IBM was going to make CP/M the standard operating system for the IBM PC. Microsoft jumped on the opportunity and found a tool called 86-DOS from a company called Seattle Computer Products. The cool thing there is that used the CP/M Api and so would be easy to have compatible software. Paul Allen worked with them to license the software then compiled it for the IBM. This was the first MS DOS and became the standard, branded as PC DOS for IBM. 

Later, Kildall agreed to sell CP/M for $240 on the IBM PCs. The problem was that PC DOS came in at $40. If you knew nothing about operating systems, which would you buy? And so even though it had compatibility with the CP/M API, PC DOS really became the standard. So much so that Digital Research would clone the Microsoft DOS and release their own DR DOS. Kildall would later describe Bill Gates using the following quote: "He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry.” While Kildall considered DOS theft, he was told not to sue because the laws simply weren’t yet clear. 

At first though, it didn’t seem to hurt. Digital Research continued to grow. By 1983 computers were booming. Digital Research would hit $45 million in sales. They had gone from just Gary to 530 employees by then. Gangbusters. Although they did notice that they missed the mark on the 8088 chips from Intel and even with massive rises in sales had lost market share to Unix System V and all the variants that would come from that. CP/M would add DOS emulation. 

But sales began to slip. The IBM 5150 and subsequent machines just took over the market. And CP/M, once a dominant player, would be left behind. Gary would move more into research and development but by 1985 resigned as the CEO of Digital Research, in a year where they laid off 200 employees. 

He helped start a show called the Computer Chronicles in 1983. It has been something I’ve been watching a lot recently, researching these episodes and it’s awesome! He was a kinda and wicked smart man. Even to people who had screwed him over. 

As many would after them, Digital Research went into long-term legal drama, involving the US Department of Justice. But none of that saved them. And it wouldn’t save any of the other companies that went there either. Digital Research would sell to Novell for $80 million in 1991 and various parts of the intellectual property would live on with compilers, interpreters, and DR DOS living on. For example, as Caldera OpenDOS. But CP/M itself would be done.  

Kildall would die in a bar in Monterey, California in 1994. One of the pioneers of the personal computer market. From CP/M to disk buffering the data structure that made the CD, he was all over the place in personal computers. And CP/M was the gold standard of operating systems for a few years. 

One of the reasons I put this episode off is because I didn’t know how I would end it. Like, what’s the story here. I think it’s mostly that I’ve heard it said that he could have been Bill Gates. I think that’s a drastic oversimplification. CP/M could have been the operating system on the PC. But a lot of other things could have happened as well. He was wealthy, just not Bill Gates level wealthy. And rather than go into a downward spiral over what we don’t have, maybe we should all be happy with what we have. 

And much of his technology survived for decades to come. So he left behind a family and a legacy. In uncertain times, focus on the good and do well with it. And thank you for being you. And for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. 

Today we’re going to celebrate the explosion and soap-opera-esque management of Twitter. As with many things, it started with an idea. Some people get one idea. Some of these Twitter founders got multiple ideas, which is one of the more impressive parts of this story. And the story of Twitter goes back to 1999. Evan Williams created a tool that gave “push-button publishing for the people.”

That tool was called blogger.com and ignited a fire in people publishing articles about whatever they were thinking or feeling or working on or doing. Today, we just call it blogging. The service jumped in use and Evan sold the company to Google, where he worked for a bit and then left in 2004 in search of a new opportunity. Seeing the rise of podcasting, Williams founded another company called Odeo, to build a tool for podcasters. They worked away at that, being joined by Noah Glass, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, Crystal Taylor, Florian Weber, Blaine Cook, Ray McClure, Rim Roberts, Rabble, Dom, @Jeremy and others. And some investors of course. Apple added podcasts to iTunes and they knew they had to pivot. They’d had these full day sessions brainstorming new ideas. Evan was thinking more and more about this whole incubator kind of thing. Noah was going through a divorce and one night he and Jack Dorsey were going through some ideas for new pivots or companies. Jack had just been turned on to text messaging and mentioned this one idea about sharing texts to groups. The company was young and full of raver kids at the time and the thought was you could share where you are and what you were doing. Noah thought you could share your feelings as well. Since it was through text, you had a maximum 140 characters. It started as a side project. Jack and Florian Webber built a prototype. It slowly grew into a real product. They sold the remaining assets of Odeo and Twitter and was finally spun off into its own company in 2007. Noah was the first CEO. But he was ousted in 2007 when Jack Dorsey took over. They grew slowly during the year but jumped into the limelight at South By Southwest, taking home the Web Award. I joined Twitter in October of 2007. To be honest, I didn’t really get it yet. But they started to grow. And rapidly. They were becoming a news source. People were tweeting to their friends. They added the @ symbol to mention people in posts. They added the ability to retweet, or repost a tweet from someone else. And of course hashtags. Servers crashed all the time. The developers worked on anything they wanted. And after a time, the board of Twitter, which primarily consisted of investors, got tired of the company not being run well and outside Jack in 2008, letting Evan run the company. And I do like to think of the history of Twitter in stages. Noah was the incubator. He and Jack worked hard and provided a vision. Noah came up with the name, Jack helped code the site and keep it on track. Once Noah was gone they were a cool hacker collective that went into hyper growth. There wasn’t a ton of structure and the company reflected the way people used the service, a bit chaotic. But with Evan in, the hyper growth accelerated. Twitter added lists in 2009, allowing you to see updates from people you weren’t following. They were still growing fast. By 2010 there were 50 million tweets a day. Months later there were 65 million. And Jack Dorsey, while no longer at Twitter, was the media darling face of Twitter. He would found Square that year. And Square would make a dent in the multi-verse by allowing pretty much anyone to take a credit card using their phone, pretty much any time. That would indirectly lead to coffee shops, yoga studios, and any number of kinds of businesses popping up all over the world. They bought an app called Tweetie which became the Twitter app many of us use today. But servers could still crash. There was still no revenue. So Evan brought in Dick Costolo, founder of feedburner, to become the Chief Operating Officer. Dick would be named CEO. Dorsey, fuming ever since his ousting, had been behind the switch. This is where Twitter kinda’ grew up. Under Dick the site got stable finally. The users continued to grow. They started to make money. Lots of money. By 2011 they added URL shortening using the t.co domain because many of us would use a URL shortening service to conserve characters. Twitter would continue to grow and go public in 2013. By then, they’d had offers to buy equity from musicians, actors, sports stars, and even former Vice Presidents. And Twitter would continue to grow. Jack Dorsey would lead Square to an IPO in 2015. Obama would send his first tweet that same year. Shortly afterwards, Dick stepped down as the CEO of Twitter and Jack came back. Grand plans work out I suppose. Usually people don’t get back together after the breakup. But Jack did. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. While Obama had used Twitter, Trump took it to a whole new level, announcing public policy there sometimes before other politicians knew. And this is where Twitter just gets silly. Hundreds of millions of people log on and argue. Not my thing. I mostly just post links to these episodes these days. Jack Dorsey is now the CEO of both Square and Twitter. He catches flack for it every now and then - but it’s mostly working. He co-founded two great companies and he likely doesn’t want to risk losing control of either. Evan Williams founded Medium in 2012, another blogging service. Blogging, micro-blogging, then back to blogging. He has had three great companies he co-founded. And continues helping startups. Biz Stone, often the heart of twitter would found Jelly, which was sold to Pinterest. The fourth co-founder, Noah Glass, took some time away from startups. His part in the founding of Twitter was often under-estimated. But today, he’s the CEO of olo.com and serves on the board of a number of non-profits. The post-PC era, the social media era, the instant everything era. Twitter symbolizes all of it, kicked off when Jack sent the first message on March 21, 2006, 9:50 p.m. It read, "just setting up my twttr.". From a rag-tag group of kids who went to clubs to a multi-billion dollar social media behemoth, they also show the growth stages of network effect companies. The incubation period led by a passionate Noah. The release and rise period full of doing everything it takes and people working 20 hour days symbolized by the Jack part 1. The meteoric rise and beginnings of getting their ducks in order tenure of Evan. The growing up phase where they got profitable and stable with Dick. And then the Steve Jobs-esque reinvention of Jack and his return, slowing growth and reducing risk. The founders all felt like Twitter was theirs. And it was. A lot of founders think they’re going to change the world. And some actually do. And for the effort they put into putting a dent in the universe, we thank them. And you dear listeners, we think you too, for giving us the opportunity to share these stories of betrayal and shame and rebirth. We are so lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Today we’re going to celebrate the explosion and soap-opera-esque management of Twitter. As with many things, it started with an idea. Some people get one idea. Some of these Twitter founders got multiple ideas, which is one of the more impressive parts of this story. And the story of Twitter goes back to 1999. Evan Williams created a tool that gave “push-button publishing for the people.”

That tool was called blogger.com and ignited a fire in people publishing articles about whatever they were thinking or feeling or working on or doing. Today, we just call it blogging. The service jumped in use and Evan sold the company to Google, where he worked for a bit and then left in 2004 in search of a new opportunity. Seeing the rise of podcasting, Williams founded another company called Odeo, to build a tool for podcasters. They worked away at that, being joined by Noah Glass, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, Crystal Taylor, Florian Weber, Blaine Cook, Ray McClure, Rim Roberts, Rabble, Dom, @Jeremy and others. And some investors of course. Apple added podcasts to iTunes and they knew they had to pivot. They’d had these full day sessions brainstorming new ideas. Evan was thinking more and more about this whole incubator kind of thing. Noah was going through a divorce and one night he and Jack Dorsey were going through some ideas for new pivots or companies. Jack had just been turned on to text messaging and mentioned this one idea about sharing texts to groups. The company was young and full of raver kids at the time and the thought was you could share where you are and what you were doing. Noah thought you could share your feelings as well. Since it was through text, you had a maximum 140 characters. It started as a side project. Jack and Florian Webber built a prototype. It slowly grew into a real product. They sold the remaining assets of Odeo and Twitter and was finally spun off into its own company in 2007. Noah was the first CEO. But he was ousted in 2007 when Jack Dorsey took over. They grew slowly during the year but jumped into the limelight at South By Southwest, taking home the Web Award. I joined Twitter in October of 2007. To be honest, I didn’t really get it yet. But they started to grow. And rapidly. They were becoming a news source. People were tweeting to their friends. They added the @ symbol to mention people in posts. They added the ability to retweet, or repost a tweet from someone else. And of course hashtags. Servers crashed all the time. The developers worked on anything they wanted. And after a time, the board of Twitter, which primarily consisted of investors, got tired of the company not being run well and outside Jack in 2008, letting Evan run the company. And I do like to think of the history of Twitter in stages. Noah was the incubator. He and Jack worked hard and provided a vision. Noah came up with the name, Jack helped code the site and keep it on track. Once Noah was gone they were a cool hacker collective that went into hyper growth. There wasn’t a ton of structure and the company reflected the way people used the service, a bit chaotic. But with Evan in, the hyper growth accelerated. Twitter added lists in 2009, allowing you to see updates from people you weren’t following. They were still growing fast. By 2010 there were 50 million tweets a day. Months later there were 65 million. And Jack Dorsey, while no longer at Twitter, was the media darling face of Twitter. He would found Square that year. And Square would make a dent in the multi-verse by allowing pretty much anyone to take a credit card using their phone, pretty much any time. That would indirectly lead to coffee shops, yoga studios, and any number of kinds of businesses popping up all over the world. They bought an app called Tweetie which became the Twitter app many of us use today. But servers could still crash. There was still no revenue. So Evan brought in Dick Costolo, founder of feedburner, to become the Chief Operating Officer. Dick would be named CEO. Dorsey, fuming ever since his ousting, had been behind the switch. This is where Twitter kinda’ grew up. Under Dick the site got stable finally. The users continued to grow. They started to make money. Lots of money. By 2011 they added URL shortening using the t.co domain because many of us would use a URL shortening service to conserve characters. Twitter would continue to grow and go public in 2013. By then, they’d had offers to buy equity from musicians, actors, sports stars, and even former Vice Presidents. And Twitter would continue to grow. Jack Dorsey would lead Square to an IPO in 2015. Obama would send his first tweet that same year. Shortly afterwards, Dick stepped down as the CEO of Twitter and Jack came back. Grand plans work out I suppose. Usually people don’t get back together after the breakup. But Jack did. In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. While Obama had used Twitter, Trump took it to a whole new level, announcing public policy there sometimes before other politicians knew. And this is where Twitter just gets silly. Hundreds of millions of people log on and argue. Not my thing. I mostly just post links to these episodes these days. Jack Dorsey is now the CEO of both Square and Twitter. He catches flack for it every now and then - but it’s mostly working. He co-founded two great companies and he likely doesn’t want to risk losing control of either. Evan Williams founded Medium in 2012, another blogging service. Blogging, micro-blogging, then back to blogging. He has had three great companies he co-founded. And continues helping startups. Biz Stone, often the heart of twitter would found Jelly, which was sold to Pinterest. The fourth co-founder, Noah Glass, took some time away from startups. His part in the founding of Twitter was often under-estimated. But today, he’s the CEO of olo.com and serves on the board of a number of non-profits. The post-PC era, the social media era, the instant everything era. Twitter symbolizes all of it, kicked off when Jack sent the first message on March 21, 2006, 9:50 p.m. It read, "just setting up my twttr.". From a rag-tag group of kids who went to clubs to a multi-billion dollar social media behemoth, they also show the growth stages of network effect companies. The incubation period led by a passionate Noah. The release and rise period full of doing everything it takes and people working 20 hour days symbolized by the Jack part 1. The meteoric rise and beginnings of getting their ducks in order tenure of Evan. The growing up phase where they got profitable and stable with Dick. And then the Steve Jobs-esque reinvention of Jack and his return, slowing growth and reducing risk. The founders all felt like Twitter was theirs. And it was. A lot of founders think they’re going to change the world. And some actually do. And for the effort they put into putting a dent in the universe, we thank them. And you dear listeners, we think you too, for giving us the opportunity to share these stories of betrayal and shame and rebirth. We are so lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Today we’re going to talk through the history of the Commodore. That history starts with Idek Trzmiel, who would become Jack Tramiel when he immigrated to the United States. Tramiel was an Auschwitz survivor and Like many immigrants throughout history, he was a hard worker. He would buy a small office repair company in the Bronx with money he saved up driving taxis in New York and got a loan to help by the company through the US Army.

He wanted a name that reflected the military that had rescued him from the camp so he picked Commodore and incorporated the company in Toronto. He would import Czeck typewriters through Toronto and assemble them, moving to adding machines when lower-cost Japanese typewriters started to enter the market. By 1962, Commodore got big enough to go public on the New York Stock Exchange. Those adding machines would soon be called calculators when they went from electromechanical devices to digital, with Commodore making a bundle off the Minuteman calculators. Tramiel and Commodore investor Irving Gould flew to Japan to see how to better compete with manufacturers in the market.

They got their chips to build the calculators from MOS Technology and the MOS 6502 chip took off quickly becoming one of the most popular chips in early computing. When Texas Instruments, who designed the chips, entered the calculator market, everyone knew calculators were a dead end. The Altair had been released in 1975. But it used the Intel chips. Tramiel would get a loan to buy MOS for $3 million dollars and it would become the Commodore Semiconductor Group. The PC revolution was on the way and this is where Chuck Peddle, who came to Commodore from the acquisition comes in. Seeing the 6502 chips that MOS started building in 1975 and the 6507 that had been used in the Atari 2600, Pebble pushed to start building computers.

Commodore had gotten to 60 million in revenues but the Japanese exports of calculators and typewriters left them needing a new product. Pebble proposed they build a computer and developed one called the Commodore PET. Starting at $800, the PET would come with a MOS 6502 chip - the same chip that shipped in the Apple I that year. It came with an integrated keyboard and monitor. And Commodore BASIC in a ROM. And as with many in that era, a cassette deck to load data in and save it. Commodore was now a real personal computer company. And one of the first. Along with the TRS-80, or Trash 80 and Apple when the Apple II was released they would be known as the Trinity of Personal Computers.

By 1980 they would be a top 3 company in the market, which was growing rapidly. Unlike Apple, they didn’t focus on great products or software and share was dropping. So in 1981 they would release the VIC-20. This machine came with Commodore BASIC 2.0, still used a 6502 chip. But by now prices had dropped to a level where the computer could sell for $299. The PET would be a computer integrated into a keyboard so you brought your own monitor, which could be composite, similar to what shipped in the Apple IIc. And it would be marked in retail outlets, like K-Mart where it was the first computer to be sold.

They would outsource the development of the VICModem and did deals with the Source, CompuServe, and others to give out free services to get people connected to the fledgeling internet. The market was getting big. Over 800 software titles were available. Today you can use VICE, a VIC-20 emulator, to use many of them! But the list of vendors they were competing with would grow, including the Apple II, The TRS-80, and the Atari 800. They would sell over a million in that first year, but a new competitor emerged in the Commodore 64.

Initially referred to as the VIC-40, the Commodore 64 showed up in 1982 and would start at around $600 and came with the improved 6510 or 8500 MOS chip and the 64k of ram that gave it its name. It is easily one of the most recognizable computer names in history. IT could double as a video game console. Sales were initially slow as software developers caught up to the new chips - and they kinda’ had to work through some early problems with units failing. They still sold millions and millions by the mid 1980s. But they would need to go into a price war with Texas Instruments, Atari, and other big names of the time. Commodore would win that war but lost Tramiel along the way. He quit after disagreements with Gould, who brought in a former executive from a steel company with no experience in computers. Ironically, Tramel bought Atari after he left.

A number of models would come out over the next few years with the Commodore MAX, Communicator 64, the SX-64, the C128, the Commodore 64 Game System, the 65, which was killed off by Irving Gould in 1991. And by 1993, Gould had mismanaged the company. But Commodore would buy Amiga for $25 million in 1984. They wouldn’t rescue the company with a 32 bit computer. After the Mac and the IBM came along in 1984 and after the downward pressures that had been put on prices, Commodore never fully recovered. Yes, they released systems. Like the Amiga 500 and ST, but they were never as dominant and couldn’t shake the low priced image for later Amiga models like one of the best machines made for its time, the Amiga 1000. Or the 2000s to compete with the Mac or with entries in the PC clone market to compete with the deluge of vendors that did that.

They even tried a MicrosoftBASIC interpreter and their own Amiga Unix System V Release variant. But, ultimately by 1994 the company would go into bankruptcy with surviving subsidiaries going through that demise that happens where you end up with your intellectual property somehow being held by Gateway computers. More on them in a later episode.

I do think the story here is a great one. A person manages to survive Auschwitz, move to the United States, and build a publicly traded empire that is easily one of the most recognizable names in computing. That survival and perseverance should be applauded. Tramiel would run Atari until he sold it in the mid-90s and would cofound the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He was a hard negotiator and a competent business person. Today, in tech we say that competing on price is a race to the bottom.

He had to live that. But he and his exceptional team at Commodore certainly deserve our thanks, for helping to truly democratize computing, putting low-cost single board machines on the shelves at Toys-R-Us and K-mart and giving me exposure to BASIC at a young age. And thank you, listeners, for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so lucky you listen to these stories. Have a great day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMD2nF7meDI.

Today we’re going to talk through the history of the Commodore. That history starts with Idek Trzmiel, who would become Jack Tramiel when he immigrated to the United States. Tramiel was an Auschwitz survivor and Like many immigrants throughout history, he was a hard worker. He would buy a small office repair company in the Bronx with money he saved up driving taxis in New York and got a loan to help by the company through the US Army.

He wanted a name that reflected the military that had rescued him from the camp so he picked Commodore and incorporated the company in Toronto. He would import Czeck typewriters through Toronto and assemble them, moving to adding machines when lower-cost Japanese typewriters started to enter the market. By 1962, Commodore got big enough to go public on the New York Stock Exchange. Those adding machines would soon be called calculators when they went from electromechanical devices to digital, with Commodore making a bundle off the Minuteman calculators. Tramiel and Commodore investor Irving Gould flew to Japan to see how to better compete with manufacturers in the market.

They got their chips to build the calculators from MOS Technology and the MOS 6502 chip took off quickly becoming one of the most popular chips in early computing. When Texas Instruments, who designed the chips, entered the calculator market, everyone knew calculators were a dead end. The Altair had been released in 1975. But it used the Intel chips. Tramiel would get a loan to buy MOS for $3 million dollars and it would become the Commodore Semiconductor Group. The PC revolution was on the way and this is where Chuck Peddle, who came to Commodore from the acquisition comes in. Seeing the 6502 chips that MOS started building in 1975 and the 6507 that had been used in the Atari 2600, Pebble pushed to start building computers.

Commodore had gotten to 60 million in revenues but the Japanese exports of calculators and typewriters left them needing a new product. Pebble proposed they build a computer and developed one called the Commodore PET. Starting at $800, the PET would come with a MOS 6502 chip - the same chip that shipped in the Apple I that year. It came with an integrated keyboard and monitor. And Commodore BASIC in a ROM. And as with many in that era, a cassette deck to load data in and save it. Commodore was now a real personal computer company. And one of the first. Along with the TRS-80, or Trash 80 and Apple when the Apple II was released they would be known as the Trinity of Personal Computers.

By 1980 they would be a top 3 company in the market, which was growing rapidly. Unlike Apple, they didn’t focus on great products or software and share was dropping. So in 1981 they would release the VIC-20. This machine came with Commodore BASIC 2.0, still used a 6502 chip. But by now prices had dropped to a level where the computer could sell for $299. The PET would be a computer integrated into a keyboard so you brought your own monitor, which could be composite, similar to what shipped in the Apple IIc. And it would be marked in retail outlets, like K-Mart where it was the first computer to be sold.

They would outsource the development of the VICModem and did deals with the Source, CompuServe, and others to give out free services to get people connected to the fledgeling internet. The market was getting big. Over 800 software titles were available. Today you can use VICE, a VIC-20 emulator, to use many of them! But the list of vendors they were competing with would grow, including the Apple II, The TRS-80, and the Atari 800. They would sell over a million in that first year, but a new competitor emerged in the Commodore 64.

Initially referred to as the VIC-40, the Commodore 64 showed up in 1982 and would start at around $600 and came with the improved 6510 or 8500 MOS chip and the 64k of ram that gave it its name. It is easily one of the most recognizable computer names in history. IT could double as a video game console. Sales were initially slow as software developers caught up to the new chips - and they kinda’ had to work through some early problems with units failing. They still sold millions and millions by the mid 1980s. But they would need to go into a price war with Texas Instruments, Atari, and other big names of the time. Commodore would win that war but lost Tramiel along the way. He quit after disagreements with Gould, who brought in a former executive from a steel company with no experience in computers. Ironically, Tramel bought Atari after he left.

A number of models would come out over the next few years with the Commodore MAX, Communicator 64, the SX-64, the C128, the Commodore 64 Game System, the 65, which was killed off by Irving Gould in 1991. And by 1993, Gould had mismanaged the company. But Commodore would buy Amiga for $25 million in 1984. They wouldn’t rescue the company with a 32 bit computer. After the Mac and the IBM came along in 1984 and after the downward pressures that had been put on prices, Commodore never fully recovered. Yes, they released systems. Like the Amiga 500 and ST, but they were never as dominant and couldn’t shake the low priced image for later Amiga models like one of the best machines made for its time, the Amiga 1000. Or the 2000s to compete with the Mac or with entries in the PC clone market to compete with the deluge of vendors that did that.

They even tried a MicrosoftBASIC interpreter and their own Amiga Unix System V Release variant. But, ultimately by 1994 the company would go into bankruptcy with surviving subsidiaries going through that demise that happens where you end up with your intellectual property somehow being held by Gateway computers. More on them in a later episode.

I do think the story here is a great one. A person manages to survive Auschwitz, move to the United States, and build a publicly traded empire that is easily one of the most recognizable names in computing. That survival and perseverance should be applauded. Tramiel would run Atari until he sold it in the mid-90s and would cofound the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He was a hard negotiator and a competent business person. Today, in tech we say that competing on price is a race to the bottom.

He had to live that. But he and his exceptional team at Commodore certainly deserve our thanks, for helping to truly democratize computing, putting low-cost single board machines on the shelves at Toys-R-Us and K-mart and giving me exposure to BASIC at a young age. And thank you, listeners, for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so lucky you listen to these stories. Have a great day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMD2nF7meDI.

Most computers today have multiple batteries. Going way, way, back, most had a CMOS or BIOS battery used to run the clock and keep BIOS configurations when the computer was powered down. These have mostly centered around the CR2032 lithium button cell battery, also common in things like garage door openers and many of my kids toys!

Given the transition to laptops for a lot of people now that families, schools, and companies mostly deploy one computer per person, there’s a larger battery in a good percentage of machines made. Laptops mostly use lithium ion batteries, which 

The oldest known batteries are “Baghdad batteries”, dating back to about 200BC. They could have been used for a number of things, like electroplating. But it would take 2,000 years to get back to it. As is often the case, things we knew as humans, once backed up with science, became much, much more. First, scientists were studying positive and negative elements and forming an understanding that electricity flowed between them. Like the English natural scientist, William Gilbert  - who first established some of the basics of electricity and magnetism. And Sir Thomas Browne, who continued to refine theories and was the first to call it “electricity.” Then another British scientist, Peter Collinson, sent Franklin an electricity tube, which these previous experiments had begun to produce. 

Benjamin Franklin spent some time writing back and forth with Collinson and flew a kite and proved that electrical currents flowed through a kite string and that a metal key was used to conduct that electricity. This proved that electricity was fluid. Linked capacitors came along in 1749. That was 1752 and Thomas-Francois Dalibard also proved the hypothesis using a large metal pole struck by lightning. 

Budding scientists continued to study electricity and refine the theories. 1799, Alessandro Volta built a battery by alternating zinc, cloth soaked in brine, and silver and stacking them. This was known as a voltaic pile and would release a steady current. The batteries corroded fast but today we still refer to the resistance of an ohm when the current of an amp flows through it as a volt. Suddenly we were creating electricity from an electrochemical reaction. 

People continued to experiment with batteries and electricity in general. Giuseppe Zamboni, another Italian, physicist invented the Zamboni pile in 1812. Here, he switched to zinc foil and manganese oxide. Completely unconnected, Swedish chemist Johann August Arfvedson discovered Lithium in 1817. Lithium. Atomic number 3. Lithium is an alkali metal found all over the world. It can be used to treat manic depression and bipolar disorder. And it powers todays modern smart-everything and Internet of thingsy world. But no one knew that yet. 

The English chemist John Frederick Daniell invented the Daniell cell in 1836, building on the concept but using a copper plate in a copper sulfate solution in a plate and hanging a zinc plate in the jar or beaker. Each plate had a wire and the zinc plate would become a negative terminal, while the copper plate would be a positive terminal and suddenly we were able to reliably produce electricity. 

Robert Anderson would build the first electric car using a battery at around the same time, but Gaston Plante would build the first rechargeable battery in 1859, which is very much resembles the ones in our cars today. He gave us the lead-acid battery, switching to lead oxide in sulfuric acid. 

In the 1860s the Daniell cell would be improved by Callaud and a lot of different experiments continued on. The Gassner dry cell came from Germany in 1886, mixing ammonium chloride with plaster of Paris and adding zinc chloride. Shelf life shot up. The National Carbon Company would swap out the plaster of Paris with coiled cardboard. That Colombia Dry Cell would be commercially sold throughout the United States and National Carbon Company, which would become Eveready, who makes the Energizer batteries that power the weird bunny with the drum. 

Swedish scientist Jungner would give us nickel-cadmium or NiCd in 1899, but they were a bit too leaky. So Thomas Edison would patent a new model in 1901, iterations of these are pretty much common through to today. Litum would start being used shortly after by GN Lewis but would not become standard until the 1970s when push button cells started to be put in cameras. Asahi Chemical out of Japan would then give us the Lithium Ion battery in 1985, brought to market by Sony in 1991, leading to  John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019. 

Those lithium ion batteries are used in most computers and smart phones today. The Osborne 1 came in 1981. It was what we now look back on as luggable computer. A 25 pound computer that could be taken on the road. But you plugged it directly into the wall. But the Epson HX-20 would ship the same year, with a battery, opening the door to batteries powering computers. 

Solar cells and other larger batteries require much larger amounts. This causes an exponential increase in demand and thus a jump in the price, making it more lucrative to mine. 

Mining lithium to create these batteries is, as with all other large scale operations taken on by humans, destroying entire ecosystems, such as those in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and the Tibetan plateau. Each ton of lithium takes half a million gallons of water, another resource that’s becoming more precious. And the waste is usually filtered back into the ecosystem. Most other areas mine lithium out of rock using traditional methods, but there’s certainly still an environmental impact. There are similar impacts to mining Cobalt and Nickel, the other two metals used in most batteries. 

So I think we’re glad we have batteries. Thank you to all these pioneers who brought us to the point that we have batteries in pretty much everything. And thank you, listeners, for sticking through to the end of this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re lucky to have you. 

Most computers today have multiple batteries. Going way, way, back, most had a CMOS or BIOS battery used to run the clock and keep BIOS configurations when the computer was powered down. These have mostly centered around the CR2032 lithium button cell battery, also common in things like garage door openers and many of my kids toys!

Given the transition to laptops for a lot of people now that families, schools, and companies mostly deploy one computer per person, there’s a larger battery in a good percentage of machines made. Laptops mostly use lithium ion batteries, which 

The oldest known batteries are “Baghdad batteries”, dating back to about 200BC. They could have been used for a number of things, like electroplating. But it would take 2,000 years to get back to it. As is often the case, things we knew as humans, once backed up with science, became much, much more. First, scientists were studying positive and negative elements and forming an understanding that electricity flowed between them. Like the English natural scientist, William Gilbert  - who first established some of the basics of electricity and magnetism. And Sir Thomas Browne, who continued to refine theories and was the first to call it “electricity.” Then another British scientist, Peter Collinson, sent Franklin an electricity tube, which these previous experiments had begun to produce. 

Benjamin Franklin spent some time writing back and forth with Collinson and flew a kite and proved that electrical currents flowed through a kite string and that a metal key was used to conduct that electricity. This proved that electricity was fluid. Linked capacitors came along in 1749. That was 1752 and Thomas-Francois Dalibard also proved the hypothesis using a large metal pole struck by lightning. 

Budding scientists continued to study electricity and refine the theories. 1799, Alessandro Volta built a battery by alternating zinc, cloth soaked in brine, and silver and stacking them. This was known as a voltaic pile and would release a steady current. The batteries corroded fast but today we still refer to the resistance of an ohm when the current of an amp flows through it as a volt. Suddenly we were creating electricity from an electrochemical reaction. 

People continued to experiment with batteries and electricity in general. Giuseppe Zamboni, another Italian, physicist invented the Zamboni pile in 1812. Here, he switched to zinc foil and manganese oxide. Completely unconnected, Swedish chemist Johann August Arfvedson discovered Lithium in 1817. Lithium. Atomic number 3. Lithium is an alkali metal found all over the world. It can be used to treat manic depression and bipolar disorder. And it powers todays modern smart-everything and Internet of thingsy world. But no one knew that yet. 

The English chemist John Frederick Daniell invented the Daniell cell in 1836, building on the concept but using a copper plate in a copper sulfate solution in a plate and hanging a zinc plate in the jar or beaker. Each plate had a wire and the zinc plate would become a negative terminal, while the copper plate would be a positive terminal and suddenly we were able to reliably produce electricity. 

Robert Anderson would build the first electric car using a battery at around the same time, but Gaston Plante would build the first rechargeable battery in 1859, which is very much resembles the ones in our cars today. He gave us the lead-acid battery, switching to lead oxide in sulfuric acid. 

In the 1860s the Daniell cell would be improved by Callaud and a lot of different experiments continued on. The Gassner dry cell came from Germany in 1886, mixing ammonium chloride with plaster of Paris and adding zinc chloride. Shelf life shot up. The National Carbon Company would swap out the plaster of Paris with coiled cardboard. That Colombia Dry Cell would be commercially sold throughout the United States and National Carbon Company, which would become Eveready, who makes the Energizer batteries that power the weird bunny with the drum. 

Swedish scientist Jungner would give us nickel-cadmium or NiCd in 1899, but they were a bit too leaky. So Thomas Edison would patent a new model in 1901, iterations of these are pretty much common through to today. Litum would start being used shortly after by GN Lewis but would not become standard until the 1970s when push button cells started to be put in cameras. Asahi Chemical out of Japan would then give us the Lithium Ion battery in 1985, brought to market by Sony in 1991, leading to  John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019. 

Those lithium ion batteries are used in most computers and smart phones today. The Osborne 1 came in 1981. It was what we now look back on as luggable computer. A 25 pound computer that could be taken on the road. But you plugged it directly into the wall. But the Epson HX-20 would ship the same year, with a battery, opening the door to batteries powering computers. 

Solar cells and other larger batteries require much larger amounts. This causes an exponential increase in demand and thus a jump in the price, making it more lucrative to mine. 

Mining lithium to create these batteries is, as with all other large scale operations taken on by humans, destroying entire ecosystems, such as those in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and the Tibetan plateau. Each ton of lithium takes half a million gallons of water, another resource that’s becoming more precious. And the waste is usually filtered back into the ecosystem. Most other areas mine lithium out of rock using traditional methods, but there’s certainly still an environmental impact. There are similar impacts to mining Cobalt and Nickel, the other two metals used in most batteries. 

So I think we’re glad we have batteries. Thank you to all these pioneers who brought us to the point that we have batteries in pretty much everything. And thank you, listeners, for sticking through to the end of this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We’re lucky to have you. 

Today we’re going to talk through the history of the Data General Nova. Digital Equipment was founded in 1957 and released a game changing computer, the PDP-8, in 1965. We covered Digital in a previous episode, but to understand the Data General Nova, you kinda’ need to understand the PDP. It was a fully transistorized computer and it was revolutionary in the sense that it brought interactive computing to the masses. Based in part on research from work done for MIT in the TX-0 era, the PDP made computing more accessible to companies that couldn’t spend millions on computers and it was easier to program - and the PDP-1 could be obtained for less than a hundred thousand dollars. You could use a screen, type commands on a keyboard for the first time and it would actually output to screen rather than reading teletypes or punch cards. That interactivity unlocked so much.

The PDP began the minicomputer revolution. The first real computer game Spacewar! Was played on it and the adoption increased. The computers got faster. They could do as much as large mainframes. The thousands of transistors were faster and less error-prone than the old tubes. In fact, those transistors signaled that the third generation of computers was upon us. And people who liked the PDP were life-long converts. Fanatical even. The PDP evolved until 1965 when the PDP-8 was released. This is where Edson de Castro comes in, acting as the project manager for the PDP-8 development at Digital. 3 years later, he, Henry Burkhardt, and Richard Sogge of Digital would be joined by Herbert Richman a sales person from Fairchild Semiconductor.

They were proud of the PDP-8. It was a beautiful machine. But they wanted to go even further. And they didn’t feel like they could do so at Digital. They would build a less expensive minicomputer that opened up even more markets. They saw new circuit board manufacturing techniques, new automation techniques, new reasons to abandon the 12-bit CPU techniques. Edson had wanted to build a PDP with all of this and the ability to use 8 bit, 16 bit, or 32 bit architectures, but it got shut down at Digital. So they got two rounds of venture capital at $400,000 each and struck out on their own. They wanted the computer to fit into a 19-inch rack mount. That choice would basically make the 19 inch rack the standard from then on.

They wanted the machines to be 16-bit, moving past the 8 or 12 bit computers common in mini-computing at the time. They used an accumulator-based architecture, which is to say that there was a CPU that had a register that stored the results of various bits of code. This way you weren’t writing the results of all the maths into memory and then sending it right back to the CPU. Suddenly, you could do infinitely more math! Having someone from Fairchild really unlocked a lot of knowledge about what was happening in the integrated circuit market. They were able to get the price down into the thousands, not tens of thousands.

You could actually buy a computer for less than 4 thousand dollars.

The Nova would ship in 1969 and be an instant success with a lot of organizations. Especially smaller science labs like one at the University of Texas that was their first real paying cusotmer. Within 6 months they sold 100 units and within the first few years, they were over $100 million in sales. They were seeking into Digital’s profits. No one would have invested in Digital had they tried to compete head-on with IBM. Digital had become the leader in the minicomputer market, effectively owning the category. But Nova posed a threat. Until they decided to get into a horse race with Digital and release the SuperNOVA to compete with the PDP-11. They used space age designs. They were great computers. But Digital was moving faster. And Data General started to have production and supply chain problems, which led to law suits and angry customers. Never good.

By 1977 Digital came out with the VAX line, setting the standard to 32-bit. Data General was late to that party and honestly, after being a market leader in low-cost computing they started to slip. By the end of the 70s microchips and personal computers would basically kill minicomputers and while transitioning from minicomputers to servers, Data General never made quite the same inroads that Digital Equipment did. Data General would end up with their own DOS, like everyone their own UNIX System V variant, one of the first portable computers, but by the mid-80s, IBM showed up on the market and Data General would make databases and a number of other areas to justify what was becoming a server market.

In fact, the eventual home for Data General would be to get acquired by EMC and become CLaRiiON under the EMC imprint. It was an amazing rise. Hardware that often looked like it came straight out of Buck Rogers. Beautiful engineering. But you just can’t compete on price and stay in business forever. Especially when you’re competing with your former bosses who have much much deeper pockets.

EMC benefited from a lot of these types of acquisitions over the years, to become a colossus by the end of the 2010s. We can thank Data General and specifically the space age nova, for helping set many standards we use today. We can thank them for helping democratize computing in general. And if you’re a heavy user of EMC appliances, you can probably thank them for plenty of underlying bits of what you do even through to today. But the minicomputer market required companies to make their own chips in that era and that was destroyed by the dominance of Intel in the microchip industry. It’s too bad.

So many good ideas. But the costs to keep up turned out to be too much for them, as with many other vendors. One way to think about this story. You can pick up on new manufacturing and design techniques and compete with some pretty large players, especially on price. But when the realities of scaling an operation come you can’t stumble or customer confidence will erode and there’s a chance you won’t get to compete for deals again in the future. But try telling that to your growing sales team.

I hear people say you have to outgrow the growth rate of your category. You don’t. But you do have to do what you say you will and deliver. And when changes in the industry come, you can’t be all over the place. A cohesive strategy will help you whether the storm. So thank you for tuning into this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so lucky you chose to join us and we hope to see you next time! Have a great day!

Today we’re going to talk through the history of the Data General Nova. Digital Equipment was founded in 1957 and released a game changing computer, the PDP-8, in 1965. We covered Digital in a previous episode, but to understand the Data General Nova, you kinda’ need to understand the PDP. It was a fully transistorized computer and it was revolutionary in the sense that it brought interactive computing to the masses. Based in part on research from work done for MIT in the TX-0 era, the PDP made computing more accessible to companies that couldn’t spend millions on computers and it was easier to program - and the PDP-1 could be obtained for less than a hundred thousand dollars. You could use a screen, type commands on a keyboard for the first time and it would actually output to screen rather than reading teletypes or punch cards. That interactivity unlocked so much.

The PDP began the minicomputer revolution. The first real computer game Spacewar! Was played on it and the adoption increased. The computers got faster. They could do as much as large mainframes. The thousands of transistors were faster and less error-prone than the old tubes. In fact, those transistors signaled that the third generation of computers was upon us. And people who liked the PDP were life-long converts. Fanatical even. The PDP evolved until 1965 when the PDP-8 was released. This is where Edson de Castro comes in, acting as the project manager for the PDP-8 development at Digital. 3 years later, he, Henry Burkhardt, and Richard Sogge of Digital would be joined by Herbert Richman a sales person from Fairchild Semiconductor.

They were proud of the PDP-8. It was a beautiful machine. But they wanted to go even further. And they didn’t feel like they could do so at Digital. They would build a less expensive minicomputer that opened up even more markets. They saw new circuit board manufacturing techniques, new automation techniques, new reasons to abandon the 12-bit CPU techniques. Edson had wanted to build a PDP with all of this and the ability to use 8 bit, 16 bit, or 32 bit architectures, but it got shut down at Digital. So they got two rounds of venture capital at $400,000 each and struck out on their own. They wanted the computer to fit into a 19-inch rack mount. That choice would basically make the 19 inch rack the standard from then on.

They wanted the machines to be 16-bit, moving past the 8 or 12 bit computers common in mini-computing at the time. They used an accumulator-based architecture, which is to say that there was a CPU that had a register that stored the results of various bits of code. This way you weren’t writing the results of all the maths into memory and then sending it right back to the CPU. Suddenly, you could do infinitely more math! Having someone from Fairchild really unlocked a lot of knowledge about what was happening in the integrated circuit market. They were able to get the price down into the thousands, not tens of thousands.

You could actually buy a computer for less than 4 thousand dollars.

The Nova would ship in 1969 and be an instant success with a lot of organizations. Especially smaller science labs like one at the University of Texas that was their first real paying cusotmer. Within 6 months they sold 100 units and within the first few years, they were over $100 million in sales. They were seeking into Digital’s profits. No one would have invested in Digital had they tried to compete head-on with IBM. Digital had become the leader in the minicomputer market, effectively owning the category. But Nova posed a threat. Until they decided to get into a horse race with Digital and release the SuperNOVA to compete with the PDP-11. They used space age designs. They were great computers. But Digital was moving faster. And Data General started to have production and supply chain problems, which led to law suits and angry customers. Never good.

By 1977 Digital came out with the VAX line, setting the standard to 32-bit. Data General was late to that party and honestly, after being a market leader in low-cost computing they started to slip. By the end of the 70s microchips and personal computers would basically kill minicomputers and while transitioning from minicomputers to servers, Data General never made quite the same inroads that Digital Equipment did. Data General would end up with their own DOS, like everyone their own UNIX System V variant, one of the first portable computers, but by the mid-80s, IBM showed up on the market and Data General would make databases and a number of other areas to justify what was becoming a server market.

In fact, the eventual home for Data General would be to get acquired by EMC and become CLaRiiON under the EMC imprint. It was an amazing rise. Hardware that often looked like it came straight out of Buck Rogers. Beautiful engineering. But you just can’t compete on price and stay in business forever. Especially when you’re competing with your former bosses who have much much deeper pockets.

EMC benefited from a lot of these types of acquisitions over the years, to become a colossus by the end of the 2010s. We can thank Data General and specifically the space age nova, for helping set many standards we use today. We can thank them for helping democratize computing in general. And if you’re a heavy user of EMC appliances, you can probably thank them for plenty of underlying bits of what you do even through to today. But the minicomputer market required companies to make their own chips in that era and that was destroyed by the dominance of Intel in the microchip industry. It’s too bad.

So many good ideas. But the costs to keep up turned out to be too much for them, as with many other vendors. One way to think about this story. You can pick up on new manufacturing and design techniques and compete with some pretty large players, especially on price. But when the realities of scaling an operation come you can’t stumble or customer confidence will erode and there’s a chance you won’t get to compete for deals again in the future. But try telling that to your growing sales team.

I hear people say you have to outgrow the growth rate of your category. You don’t. But you do have to do what you say you will and deliver. And when changes in the industry come, you can’t be all over the place. A cohesive strategy will help you whether the storm. So thank you for tuning into this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We are so lucky you chose to join us and we hope to see you next time! Have a great day!