
Why did the 1982-era MCZ 2/60 desktop computer have an Exxon logo on it? - ilamont
https://twitter.com/kenshirriff/status/1248739154587840513
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GCA10
The early 1980s were the heyday of management consultants peddling wild
diversification strategies to stodgy companies. Other examples: \- Owens-
Illinois (glass bottles; no growth) was told to buy nursing homes (people get
older; lots of growth). It did so, only to bail out years later \- Kao
(Japanese detergent maker) tried expanding into floppy discs. Didn't work out.

All these moves were based on a child-like belief that getting any aging
company and its management into a growing business was more important than
having the culture, talent, processes, etc. to work well in that industry.
Call it a stock-picker's mentality.

This context helps explain why stock buybacks have become such a big thing
now. When companies have more cash flow than they can profitably use in their
core business, they no longer are as eager to diversify into fast-growth,
cash-hungry businesses that need funding. BigCo managers now know their
limits.

So they give the money back to shareholders instead. And investors can insta-
swap into supposedly "better" industries, where fully formed management teams
and business processes are ready to roll.

We can argue about whether multi-billion-dollar buybacks are a good thing for
society or not. But we got here for a reason.

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markc
Ha. My dad was VP engineering at Vydec for a while. I worked there for a
summer, and used the Vydec to write a Pascal course (which I taught there). It
had a great vector display, nice keyboard. It had 8” floppy disks. I think
they were selling for $10k. I remember seeing my first sealed 20Mb
“Winchester” hard drive there, which would be incorporated soon. Nicely
designed, advanced word processors for their time. Dad told me about the time
he met with Francis Ford Coppola who wanted to buy a bunch for Apocalypse Now.
Exxon Information Systems bought them around then, and there was a management
bloodbath. My dad initially got more responsibility as his bosses got the axe,
but he saw the writing on the wall and left for DEC. Wang soon destroyed them
in the market.

~~~
reaperducer
_Wang soon destroyed them in the market_

"Wang" sets off a lot of old memories for me.

A Wang was the first proper terminal I ever used. It was at a chemical
company, and interfaced to a minicomputer that contained all of the safety
information for the chemicals the company produced.

One of my responsibilities was printing labels for one-off sample drums of
chemicals that went out to potential customers.

I'd use the Wang to key in the information about what was in the drum, and the
minicomputer drove this incredible laser printer. It was about the size of a
pizza oven, and could print the drum labels so fast that they were actually
tractor feed. It's the only tractor feed laser printer I've ever seen.

The label stock was awesome. Big, long stickers about the size of a flat-
screen TV with hazardous materials symbols on one end.

I also used the Wang to update the various Material Safety Data Sheets binders
that were distributed around the campus. But that was much less fun.

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tyingq
Some detail on the time period when Exxon owned Zilog:
[https://mondaynote.com/50-years-intech-part-4-the-exxon-
delu...](https://mondaynote.com/50-years-intech-part-4-the-exxon-
delusion-d92ada84f6e)

~~~
rbanffy
Love those vector-display word processors.
[https://www.museebolo.ch/operation-sauvetage-dun-
vydec-800-t...](https://www.museebolo.ch/operation-sauvetage-dun-
vydec-800-titre-provisoire/)

~~~
TedDoesntTalk
That's not a vector display.

~~~
kens
Strangely enough, the Vydec Exxon word processor did have a vector display.
See the datasheet for instance. The patent has tons of information on the
circuitry. They made italics by shifting the vectors and small characters by
scaling the vectors.

[http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/files/data-
sheet...](http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/files/data-sheet-
vydec-1800.pdf)
[https://patents.google.com/patent/US4310840A](https://patents.google.com/patent/US4310840A)

~~~
rbanffy
I'd love to see a dump of the font geometry...

------
segfaultbuserr
It's important to point out that Exxon was the original investor of Zilog from
the beginning, giving Zilog the fund needed to start the company. This
includes building Zilog's own semiconductor fab to manufacture the chip,
costed several millions of dollars, which was the standard practice in the
1970s - fabless wasn't really a thing until the early 90s. "Oil money", a hot
topic debated today, was the norm.

> Federico Faggin (who designed the Intel 8080, founded Zilog and designed the
> Z80) said: When I joined -- when Zilog was formed -- by the way, Ralph and
> his wife set up the original office in State Street in downtown Los Altos,
> so I already had an office and a desk when I arrived at Zilog. Of course,
> Zilog in those days was not called Zilog yet. And then we had an interview
> with a reporter from the Electronic News, which was a weekly newspaper in
> the electronics field, was very well-known. And this reporter reported that
> there was this company that had been formed with Faggin, Ungermann, and they
> were going to be some kind of microprocessor company. And that caught the
> eye of Exxon Enterprises. Exxon Enterprises in those days was a subsidiary
> of Exxon Corporation, the oil company. And they were making venture capital
> investments in the R&D information technology. So somebody called me up from
> Exxon and wanted to visit.

> [...] Yeah, it isn’t that I didn’t intend to build a fab. I didn’t believe
> that we could possibly get the money to build the fab. You know, even if in
> those days fabs were not very expensive, it would still take several million
> dollars for the equipment, whereas now, of course, it’s several billion. But
> in those days with the three-four million of equipment, you can actually
> build a small fab. So I didn’t think we could get the money. But then after
> the success of the Z80, Ralph and I were able to convince Exxon Enterprises
> to actually fund a fab. Also it was absolutely essential if we had a second
> sourcing arrangement with Mostek as we did, that we were independent in
> manufacturing in order to survive as a company. So it was an imperative to
> have a fab at that point.

The interview by Computer History Museum is extremely interesting (as always)
and worth reading.

* Zilog Oral History Panel on the Founding of the Company and the Development of the Z80 Microprocessor

[http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Zilog_Z80/102658073.05.01.pdf)

------
cbm-vic-20
That also looks like a rebranded DEC VT-100 terminal.

~~~
tyingq
I think it's actually a rebranded C-ITOH CIT-101. [https://terminals-
wiki.org/wiki/images/8/86/C._Itoh_CIT-101_...](https://terminals-
wiki.org/wiki/images/8/86/C._Itoh_CIT-101_281787244079-1.jpg)

~~~
rbanffy
I wonder if the hardware inside the case is equally similar.

~~~
tyingq
I believe these were something like the Kaypro, where there was no onboard
graphics...just a serial console. So, no reason to change it, other than maybe
some tweaks to the ROM for branding in the admin interface and boot-up.

~~~
rbanffy
Sorry. I meant in relation to the vt100 - it was a very expandable machine
that served as the chassis for some stand-alone desktop computers sold by DEC.

~~~
tyingq
Ah, got it.

Here's some pictures of the guts of the CIT-101.
[https://m.imgur.com/a/fClBw](https://m.imgur.com/a/fClBw)

