IP: Re: And they said it couldn't be done...

[David Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>]

They were fun at least .. djf




From: rjs@rpcp.mit.edu (Richard Jay Solomon)


While some of these quotes are true, others are proven urban myths.


Neither Harry nor Sam Warner said that about talkies (though I have often
seen it ascribed to one or the other). Indeed, in 1927, Warner Bros. was
betting the farm on sound movies, funded the "Jazz Singer," and later won
an important patent infringement against Western Electric on sound movies.


No one at Western Union wrote that memo. It was forged many decades later
as a joke. W.U. was actively pursuing telephone patents in the late 1870s;
they just bet on the wrong inventor and settled out of court with AT&T
later. Actually the story is very complicated, but they liked telephones
enough to build systems even before Alex.


Tom Watson, Sr.  didn't even know what a computer was in 1943 -- they were
top secret and the only one was in Britain at Bletchley.  Von Neumann made
that statement in 1954 (I have witnesses on tape) when he was a consultant
to IBM on the 701. Watson Jr. was the one who pushed the machine through
IBM. He was an optimist. He estimated that they would sell twenty 701s, and
they only sold 19. The U.K. Ministry of Trade put out a report around 1951
stating there was only need for ONE Commonwealth computer and there were
going to put it in India so they could fly the printouts to all parts of
the Empire with equal time. Von Neumann was responding to that report -- he
thought he was being optimistic but cautioned that after all the math
"problems" were solved, we should scrap all but one machine, and keep that
last one in the Smithsonian for demos. He was right. His Edvac is in the
Smithsonian.


The Woz _was_ working for HP. He quit when they turned him down on the
Apple I breadboard, sold his humongous HP calculator, and went into
business with Jobs.


The Sarnoff memo was also a forgery to make him look good. Again, the real
story of radio is much more complicated. Sarnoff wasn't even a player at
the time.


I wonder about the other stories.


Richard