[PLUG-TALK] Sears doomed
Dick Steffens
dick at dicksteffens.com
Fri Jun 1 20:03:20 UTC 2018
On 06/01/2018 12:45 PM, Paul Heinlein wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Jun 2018, Rich Shepard wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 1 Jun 2018, Aaron Burt wrote:
>>
>>> Sears was built on mail-order, and prospered on the spread and
>>> decentralization of America.
>>
>> And their catelogs supplied outhouses in every rural area of fly-over
>> country. Softer than corncobs.
>
> While I have nostalgic memories of training myself in the ways of
> consumerism poring over the Sears catalog in the months leading up to
> Christmas, I haven't purchased anything of significance in a Sears
> store for years, probably decades.
>
> When I lived in Denver, I drove down streets full of Sears kit homes,
> most of which were built in the 1910s and 20s. Any individual instance
> was only as good as the person who assembled it (often the owner), but
> at their best those houses provided quality entry-level housing for
> communities that couldn't rely on local resources for home building.
Another example of what happens when you don't keep up with the times.
I was working for Prime Computer when microprocessors were becoming more
available. A number of the engineers started experimenting with them,
and I think some of them created a boot loader to replace the front
panel. The Research department tried to get upper management interested
in developing a serious product around a microchip, but couldn't get
anywhere with them. So they went off and created Apollo Computer, which
did use a Motorola 68000 chip (I think) to create their workstations. I
left Framingham for Chelmsford a couple of years after Apollo got
started and stayed with them a few years.
Prime, on the other hand, kept trying to build minicomputers, shifted
into CAD, and then folded.
--
Regards,
Dick Steffens
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