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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (620340)	7/20/2011 6:09:05 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1578048

>> Like? Well, as early as '78 they had Microsoft FORTRAN (which I used that year to develop a terminal emulator for Dr Pepper Co; compiler was buggy as hell -- was told by one of the company's ten employees that "we don't plan to do anything about that") and MSCOBOL. Before there was an IBM PC - sometime around '80, they had actually developed a Z80 card to plug into the Apple II to allow their Z80 products to run on the Apple II. I'm not sure how much of a success it was, however. Also, XENIX was either close to release or had been released by the time the PC showed up. Anyway, they weren't just sitting around waiting on IBM to release the PC. >> In 1980? What had they failed at in that time frame? I was referring to their failed efforts to open a chain of retail stores (the second of which was located in Dallas at Mockingbird near Stemmons, 77-78). They were PDP-8 based systems running RT-11, but they had no application software. The store sucked compared to the popular hobbiest stores (like The Micro Store on N. Central and the Heathkit store in downtown). Later, they stuck a Z80 in a VT100 and tried to sell it at retail and it failed. I think they had a couple more, but I'd moved on from DEC and didn't follow what happened with them.