> IBM sent people around to talk to us, and they were simply the wrong people. Initially they sent marketing big shots, who didn't understand anything technical at all. ... They sent technical people, who just had the attitude, "You tell us what you want, and we'll do it for you. We're the technical people" ... We couldn't communicate with those guys.
Sounds like product managers, like the Tom Smykowski character from Office Space, are important after all.
I vaguely remember reading somewhere that GE, at the time, saw computing like electrical power or tap water and wanted to deliver mainframe time sharing to people's terminal through high speed connections. They even asked the bell lab guys to write multics for that (which Thompson and Ritchie parodied with Unix).
They basically imagined the "cloud" 50 years too early.
We went from mainframes and terminals that accessed them to personal computers back to terminals of all sorts of shapes and sizes accessing everything on modern mainframes again.
Towards the end there's an interesting table that shows IBM had almost grown to the size of GE by 1964, several years before the introduction of their famous system 360.
The original image was, of course, a photograph made from negative B&W film. For one color printing, the picture was halftoned[1] to simulate greyscale or continuous tone. When the reproduced halftone image was scanned, due to the scanning dpi, it created a moiré pattern.[2]
tl;dr But I did search for the word "Xerox" and didn't find it.
No, not that Xerox computer. The Sigma 7 timesharing computers from SDS, which they bought in 1969 and shut down in 1975. GE was running those on a contract for the Defense Department on some overseas spy bases.
That's why my brother Bill in this article was in Thailand:
Sounds like product managers, like the Tom Smykowski character from Office Space, are important after all.