thanks 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
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