Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: May 31, 2021

• Silicon Cowboys documentary
• Open by Rod Canion
• Portable before Compaq, Silent 700
• Osborne Effect
• PBS Silicon Valley documentary
• IBM’s role in Compaq history
• 80’s Ads: John Cleese, Charlie Chaplin
• Compaq and iPhone?
• Decline and Acquisition
• Something Ventured documentary
• PRs welcome!

The truth is actually scarier, Facebook doesn’t need the mic to be on … to read your mind.

I was trying to watch “Halt and Catch Fire” with my kid … and there’s a lot of spontaneous sex breaking out…Fastest to one billion in revenue… fastest to Fortune 500… a meteoric rise

Their timing was right. The way they did the company was right. And they executed really really well.To go from zero to 50 thousand units, of almost anything, in the time span they did, is incredible.

Those portables were barely luggable, they were huge!Back in a time when there was no network. Being able to pick up your computer and take it to a place, was your network.

You had the T.I. Silent 700, in the 70’s, you could tote that home and plug it into the modem.

Bryan and Steve (clearly excited): What was the Osborne Effect!?
 Tom: Pre-announcing the next machine.Telling customers: man, if you love the Osborne 1, just wait till the Osborne 2… So they did!

Early on, before even thinking about what to go do, they were talking about the kind of company they wanted to build.

In many ways the story of Compaq is as much the story of the failed PS/2.It was such a mis-execution to do this analysis on the market and say: we need to grab our existing customers and lock them in, before they slip through our fingers, and in doing so, just hasten their departure.
 And Compaq was in the right spot to pick up the pieces.

I am a sacrificial sheep, I can’t possibly go. You are a sacrificial lamb.The machines themselves are anemic, if you want any functionality you go to a third party..
There were magazines filled with advice on which sound-generating card you should buy.

IBM clearly thought Intel would never give some clone manufacturer the first rights to the 386.They went from fast follower to innovator.

Certainly Microsoft aided the rise of Compaq, no question. Compaq turned Microsoft into a real believer.

Cleese: I suppose the fish could give you a mega-bite! (laughs hysterically)Cleese: The Compaq Portable 2 however can run all IBM’s most popular software, 30% faster than IBM can!
(dryly) HA HA HA

You guys need to stop mocking the Chaplin ads. They were marketing gold and as a 5 year old watching bunny rabbit ear TV seeing those ads in the middle of Scooby Doo, I was begging my parents for an IBM PC!

Adam: In ’86 we had a Commodore 64 and then upgraded to a Mac Plus.
Bryan: That’s a big upgrade! Adam: It was incredible.

With the banner program, you could print “Happy Birthday”, and probably other messages, but it never came up..

I think it cheapens the whole thing. No one should feel an obligation to claim their role in history by connecting themselves to the iPhone. The iPhone is not the pinnacle of human history.Just take your wins, and there are many of them. But, the time that they were dominant, that’s the story.

To be fair, DEC killed DEC.

I feel like the later history of Compaq is this sugar high of sales continuing to spike, but then ultimately it’s the ruin of the company. The company ceased to be an innovator.

Compaq systems, at this point, were very expensive. And this was part of the controversy of Rod getting run out, was not wanting to go down market.

I feel like HP hasn’t been a Silicon Valley company in a long long time.This was like the animals walking upright, where Compaq became a lot like IBM in a lot of their sales tactics.

A 7 million dollar iceberg sitting in the datacenter, this Tandem. They were so reliant on it, they had another shrink wrapped just sitting on the datacenter floor, in the event that the first one ever went out.Jimmy Treybig is a super interesting character. Very iconoclastic engineer.I didn’t realize that Tandem made KP. If it weren’t for Tandem, Kleiner Perkins wouldn’t have risen as a VC firm. They went all-in on Tandem, and Tandem had an outsized result.