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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: limtex who wrote (19545)	3/12/2001 4:05:58 AM
From: Craig Freeman	Respond to of 60323

limtex, it was several years after I bought my first hard drive that CPQ appeared on the scene. In my first days, a 320K 8" diskette drive cost $2K each. Wang labs had locked up a 6 months supply of Alan Shugart's floppy drive production. At the time, DEC was in a quandry. CDC hard drives started at $9K, and worked their way up the cost ladder quickly. CPQ came along after Alan Shugart reinvented the "Winchester" hard drive .. variants of which appear in every hard drive sold today. I met Rod Canion (founder of CPQ) along with Steve Wozniak (Apple co-founder) and others some years back. IMHO, these were (and are) seriously brilliant people who, by their own admission, were ahead of their times. The history of computers is often distorted. Bill Gates and Microsoft had very little to do with the creation of our first operating systems. "Windows" was the creation of Xerox in their reknown Palo Alto labs. It appeared first in the Apple "Lisa" .. a $10K appliance that did almost nothing except look good while it worked. The only reason Apple never sued MSFT was that Xerox owned the patents. And since no one at Xerox took the time to protect those patents, their couldn't sue anyone either. "DOS" was something that Bill Gates purchased for ~$75K and resold to IBM the next day. Big Bill never paid that $75K to the original developers of DOS and kept them locked up in court for a decade while MSFT collected uncounted millions. The fine folks at "DR-DOS" never had a chance and went belly-up some years back. The history of modern computers is a long and dark tale that only dedicated ferrets will ever fully uncover. Craig PS If anyone thinks this post is "off topic", please consider the fact that -- not too long ago -- Alan Shugart owned 25% of SanDisk. If you doubt this, please check prior SEC filings for SNDK at Edgar.