4 ms·
The accounting scandal was the proximate cause, but I think the underlying issue was Moore's Law. I've examined the performance of Datapoint's TTL-based compute
by kens 3y ago
The accounting scandal was the proximate cause, but I think the underlying issue was Moore's Law. I've examined the performance of Datapoint's TTL-based computers vs microprocessors. In 1972, the 2200 V2 was over 6 times as fast as the 8008. The Datapoint 5500 (1973) was significantly faster than the 8080 (1974). The Z80 (1976) was slightly faster than the Datapoint 6600 (1977). The 8086 (1978) was about twice as fast and Datapoint never managed to catch up. Datapoint tried to pivot to Intel processors, but then they were competing against commodity PCs. Datapoint suffered a hostile takeover in 1984 but didn't go bankrupt until years later in 2000.
The point is that Datapoint's TTL-based approach was great in the early 1970s but couldn't keep up with the exponential improvements in microprocessors.
- kragen 3y agothanks for the correction about the bankruptcy; i'd seen that in fact it was a corporate raider skinning them alive rather than an actual bankruptcy but i'd forgotten but presumably to be an appealing target for such asset stripping you already need to have cratered in the stock market, which presumably is a result of failing to compete or other terrible news why didn't they just switch to cmos? every computer company was using ttl at the beginning of the 70s and lots of them survived the switch to cmos in the late 80s or early 90s. some mainframe and super companies waited until much later because they were using ecl rather than ttl my own uninformed guess previously had been that their sales force structure couldn't survive the necessary price reductions to compete against commodity pcs, because the equipment pricing had business-class plane fares and three-martini lunches for the sales force figured in, but i haven't been able to find any information about datapoint pricing in the early 80s to confirm this. apparently avoiding this problem was one of the main reasons the ibm pc was developed in such a non-ibm manner: to avoid being dependent on the ibm sales force
- AlbertCory 3y agoI will email Gordon. Maybe he can contribute.
- kragen 3y agoi'd be delighted to hear his point of view