11–20 of 56 posts
As someone pointed out in the comments, Jobs seemed to have a fascination with HP. Can anybody expound on why he had this fascination with HP and their hardware?
As someone pointed out in the comments, Jobs seemed to have a fascination with HP. Can anybody expound on why he had this fascination with HP and their hardware?
HP's legacy runs deep in the valley, it's not unique to Jobs at all. It's shocking how far HP has fallen from its illustrious past.
As someone pointed out in the comments, Jobs seemed to have a fascination with HP. Can anybody expound on why he had this fascination with HP and their hardware?
As someone pointed out in the comments, Jobs seemed to have a fascination with HP. Can anybody expound on why he had this fascination with HP and their hardware?
As someone pointed out in the comments, Jobs seemed to have a fascination with HP. Can anybody expound on why he had this fascination with HP and their hardware?
Jobs' decision to ship NeXT on 68k at the very moment when the architecture fell behind basically crippled the platform. Superscalar pipelined architectures were taking off, and where Intel managed to catch up with the Pentium and pull ahead with the P6 and derivatives, Motorla just never got it done. So while the NeXT was adequate (if somewhat slow) in 1988 by 1993 (when Intel released the Pentium, meaning that the…
Intel and Microsoft were busy eating the world, and one of the things that got gobbled up was the market segment NeXT was hoping to sell into.
As someone pointed out in the comments, Jobs seemed to have a fascination with HP. Can anybody expound on why he had this fascination with HP and their hardware?
HP’s oscilloscopes and other electronic lab equipment (at the time their exclusive focus) were beautifully designed and highest quality. Perfectionists would naturally be drawn to them. Ditto for their first calculators; they were drooled over. Printers came later; all the electronics got jettisoned into Agilent in 1999.
Incidentally, Agilent did the same thing with Varian -- an NMR company that was involved in the acquisition of data ultimately in several nobel prizes. They didn't make enough money in a two year period, and Excel and MBAs killed a multi-decade business [1], leading to unemployment and a monopoly in the field of preclinical MRI, EPR/ESR, and a duopoly in NMR spectroscopy. Ain't progress grant?
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109078071...
Jobs' decision to ship NeXT on 68k at the very moment when the architecture fell behind basically crippled the platform. Superscalar pipelined architectures were taking off, and where Intel managed to catch up with the Pentium and pull ahead with the P6 and derivatives, Motorla just never got it done. So while the NeXT was adequate (if somewhat slow) in 1988 by 1993 (when Intel released the Pentium, meaning that the…
I'm not sure a different architecture would have mattered much. NeXT was trying to launch a Unix workstation right at the twilight of the age of Unix workstations. They got clobbered using 68K, but then at around the same time Sun got clobbered using SPARC, DEC and Compaq got clobbered using Alpha, etc. Intel and Microsoft were busy eating the world, and one of the things that got gobbled up was the market segment Ne…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
HP’s oscilloscopes and other electronic lab equipment (at the time their exclusive focus) were beautifully designed and highest quality. Perfectionists would naturally be drawn to them. Ditto for their first calculators; they were drooled over. Printers came later; all the electronics got jettisoned into Agilent in 1999.
...and Agilent spun them out into Keysight, to focus on slightly random bits of lab equipment instead. What was a long and illustrious history is now...not. I much prefer my Rode & Schwarz machines. Incidentally, Agilent did the same thing with Varian -- an NMR company that was involved in the acquisition of data ultimately in several nobel prizes. They didn't make enough money in a two year period, and Excel and MBA…
Jobs' decision to ship NeXT on 68k at the very moment when the architecture fell behind basically crippled the platform. Superscalar pipelined architectures were taking off, and where Intel managed to catch up with the Pentium and pull ahead with the P6 and derivatives, Motorla just never got it done. So while the NeXT was adequate (if somewhat slow) in 1988 by 1993 (when Intel released the Pentium, meaning that the…
There were a bunch of dropped balls there. To rattle off a few:
* They targeted academic institutions first, which very much constrained their market, and didn't align well with the $6,500 base price. Which turned into closer to $10K once you bought a disk and printer. (Slightly more than $20K in 2020 dollars.)
* Disk performance on a base Cube was terrible, thanks to the reliance on an Magento-Optical disk as primary storage. (Seek times x3-4 of magnetic disks.)
* Their hardware was very good, but it's expensive to be in the hardware business and others had the resources to vastly outcompete them.
* Choice of 68K didn't help. NeXT got two chips (030 and 040) before they started having to look elsewhere. (There was an 060 that even got used in some accelerator boards, but the market was in a wholesale shift over to RISC by that time. It also can't have helped that Motorola's own RISC follow on to the 68K, the 88K, got almost immediately replaced by their PPC venture with IBM and Apple.)