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I wrote about the EO recently for Input (https://www.inputmag.com/features/fax-on-the-beach-the-story-of-atts-eo-communicator-90s-ipad-flop https://www.inputmag
by shortformblog 7y ago
I wrote about the EO recently for Input (https://www.inputmag.com/features/fax-on-the-beach-the-story-of-atts-eo-communicator-90s-ipad-flop https://www.inputmag.com/features/fax-on-the-beach-the-story...), so I actually have a couple of Hobbit chips in my house at the moment, strangely enough. (No, the EO units don’t work, unfortunately … something about 27-year-old batteries.)
It’s a really fascinating chip that reflects AT&T’s tech ambitions of the time—which flopped, hard, almost immediately after they shut down the chip’s production. If the EO situation played out differently, who knows how much bigger the Hobbit would've been.
- jdkee 7y agoThis. Given the Wired advocacy for newish techs at the time and AT&Ts market and economic dominance we could have seen this as the pager or the late 1990s. Dominate and then reduced to a niche like Blackberry as the smartphone took over. Who'd a thunk?
- unlinked_dll 7y agoWas AT&T that dominant at the time? They had been broken up just a few years earlier and would go on to be acquired by one of their spinoffs a few later
- shortformblog 7y agoOne factor here worth keeping in mind: In 1991, they bought NCR, so they were trying to expand into the tech market beyond their traditional telecom base. (Bell Labs was also owned by AT&T during the period.) They were still very cash-rich in the ’90s and trying to use that leverage in other parts of telecom, even if the Baby Bells owned local telephone service.