[Info-vax] OT: About Digital and divisions

[Neil Rieck]

On Nov 22, 12:53 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> Neil Rieck wrote:
> > Why? I have always been a bigger fan of Steve Wozniak (in my 8-bit
> > days, everyone would see the phrase "WOZ" in the code listings for the
> > Apple-2 monitor (anybody remember "call -151") as well as the sweet-16
> > routines, the BASIC RENUM routines, the 6502 disassembler, as well as
> > other stuff.)
>
> You should also be a fan of Andy Hertzfld and others because they are
> the ones who wrote the MacOS and created the macintosh. Woz was out of
> that game completely by that time (and did not agree with the concept of
> a closed case because to him, coputers were only for geeks who wanted "in".

You are correct (sort of). Woz was out (at Apple) because he was
pushed out of the way by Jobs after Woz crashed his plane then ended
up in hospital with amnesia. When Woz returned to Apple, he was pushed
back into the 8-bit division. I find it amusing when people still
criticize the OPEN/CLOSED argument. Although the Apple ][ was more
expensive than other 8-bit machines, it was very popular because it
was open. There are numerous books written about the launch of the IBM-
PC and almost everyone of them includes an account of how the people
at IBM wanted their PC to be open "like the Apple ][". Meanwhile,
there are also numerous books about Apple where the author mentioned
that Jobs seemed pissed every time he saw a third-part adapter sitting
in the Apple ][ backplane then remarking "their robbing Apple of
profits". So Between 1981 and 1984 we see the two companies flip: IBM
goes open and Apple goes closed.

Wozniak was 100% correct and the Mac would be in a very different
place Apple had allowed the world-wide computer industry to partner
with them rather than compete with them. The same case could be made
of Digital by the way. Digital raised the technical bar so-high that
one very rarely saw third party devices plugged into a PDP or VAX
(although it happened all the time at my penny-pinching company).
Third party devices were more common in Alpha (since that platform
relied upon COTS technology) but the wakeup call was (IMHO) too
little, too late.

In Steve Wu's book "The Master Switch" the author gives numerous
examples of where "open" always (eventually) beats out "closed". Hell,
Andy Hertzfield's original MacOS was custom and closed. It was so
locked down that it was almost impossible to get it to multi-task. In
order to move forward, Apple had to (quietly) replace that paradigm
with a UNIX implementation. This was the software Jobs brought over
from NeXT. (IIRC)

 NSR