Sign in with Facebook
Barry M. Katz’s Followers (5)
Barry M. Katz
More books by Barry M. Katz…
“The dominant characteristic of Silicon Valley was—and remains—the exceedingly fast pace and dynamic instability of the product development cycle within a rapidly changing technology environment.”
― Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design
― Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design
“As the 1970s drew to a close, and Commodore, Tandy, Altair, and Apple began to emerge from the sidelines, PARC director Bert Sutherland asked Larry Tesler to assess what some analysts were already predicting to be the coming era of “hobby and personal computers.” “I think that the era of the personal computer is here,” Tesler countered; “PARC has kept involved in the world of academic computing, but we have largely neglected the world of personal computing which we helped to found.”41 His warning went largely unheeded. Xerox Corporation’s parochial belief that computers need only talk to printers and filing cabinets and not to each other meant that the “office of the future” remained an unfulfilled promise, and in the years between 1978 and 1982 PARC experienced a dispersal of core talent that rivals the flight of Greek scholars during the declining years of Byzantium: Charles Simonyi brought the Alto’s Bravo text editing program to Redmond, Washington, where it was rebooted as Microsoft Word; Robert Metcalf used the Ethernet protocol he had invented at PARC to found the networking giant, 3Com; John Warnock and Charles Geschke, tiring of an unresponsive bureaucracy, took their InterPress page description language and founded Adobe Systems; Tesler himself brought the icon-based, object-oriented Smalltalk programming language with him when he joined the Lisa engineering team at Apple, and Tim Mott, his codeveloper of the Gypsy desktop interface, became one of the founders of Electronic Arts—five startups that would ultimately pay off the mortgages and student loans of many hundreds of industrial, graphic, and interaction designers, and provide the tools of the trade for untold thousands of others.”
― Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design
― Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design
“CEO Bill Hewlett personally authorized a $1 million crash program to develop a miniature, hand-held successor to the successful 9100 series desktop scientific calculator launched four years earlier. By that time, the HP catalog listed some 1,600 products, none of which sold more than ten units per day. Within six months of its launch in January 1972, the new HP-35 was selling 1,000 per day, and a year later accounted for a staggering 41 percent of the company’s total profits.”
― Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design
― Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design
Is this you? Let us know. If not, help out and invite Barry to Goodreads.
