On 02/10/2019 07:21 AM, wrote:
They didn't invent the transistor so Sony could make little radios you
could hold up to your ear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_TR-1

I can picture a couple of nerds at TI asking themselves what they could
do with those transistor things and one said let's build a little radio.
The major players in the radio business weren't interested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Christensen

It may be urban legend but the story was Christensen tried to interest
his bosses at IBM in personal computers. Eventually a letter trickled
down from the Gods that said it was nice he had a hobby but PCs were a
fad that wasn't going anywhere. He framed the letter and hung it on his
office wall.

IBM has spawned a lot of things like DRAM, magnetic stripes, and SQL as
well as developing ideas like the ATM and bar codes that have become
universal. I don't know how much they profited from them or if they even
tried.

Sometimes they tried and eventually gave it away. Their VisualAge IDE
was written in SmallTalk and they even bought the company that provided
the SmallTalk compiler. I never used it and it wasn't very popular
because of the way the workspace was structured. It deviated too far
from what programmers were used to. Then they slowly drifted into Java,
with VisualAge morphing into Eclipse. They then handed Eclipse to the
Eclipse Foundation, which is supported by a consortium.

I grew up in upstate NY and IBM Poughkeepsie spun off a lot of small
businesses. It might have been part of the anti-trust paranoia but they
often would set up a supplier and hand the business off.

In the mid-90s IBM laid a lot of people off in the area and that had a
ripple effect. They're still dropping jobs. They're supposed to be
starting a quantum computing center but that's not going to bring back
the good times.