Garage Startup Develops "Personal Computer" 80
Hugh Pickens writes "In the summer of 1980, MIT graduates Donald Faber and Peter Haberle moved into an empty two-car garage and started work building the first-ever 'personal home computer.' Now almost 30 years later, what began as a humble two-man operation has since grown into an even more humble, even more cramped computer company, based out of an even smaller single-car garage. According to Faber and Haberle, a lot has changed since Xalaga was first founded. What was once a struggling $7,500-a-year business with only a dozen or so paying customers is now a desperate $6,400-a-year business with only a half dozen or so paying customers. Faber, who turned down a promising position with GE in order to start Xalaga, a decision he now says he regrets each and every waking day, told reporters that he knew almost immediately that his company had something not-at-all special on its hands. 'We sold only one computer that first year, then the following year it was three computers, then suddenly 10 computers, then just as suddenly five computers, then back down to three computers again, and finally only one or two machines every other year for pretty much the next decade,' said Faber, standing up from the plastic milk crate that now serves as his desk. 'Had someone told us when we first started that we'd be here today, operating out of a much smaller, somehow less expensive garage, we probably would have laughed right in their face.'"
Re:wat (Score:5, Insightful)
I suppose that this is intended as an April fool's joke, but I can't figure out what part is supposed to be funny.
The only part that seems funny is that, in general, the thousands of garage start-ups that remain garage start-ups usually don't get any press coverage, so it's funny that this one does. Yeah, there are lots of them.
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It's from The Onion. It isn't one of their best articles.
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I never thought I see the day when I wished OMG!!!PONIES!!! back...
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Seconded.
Hey, remember the year when Slashdot's April Fool's joke was that all the stories were actually serious? That was a good year.
you young whippersnappers (Score:1)
I remember the year when Slashdot set all manner of cookies with names like "mothersmaidenname", "creditcardnumbers" and "bankinginfo". That was a good April Fools joke.
now get off my lawn.
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and, you can get your wish if you run an older Firefox release.
http://www.downloadatlas.com/no_status_bar_links/slashdotter-by-christopher-finke.html [downloadatlas.com]
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What (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:What (Score:4, Insightful)
I want to mod up your comment. The Onion is top-rate satire, this particular article is a send-up of every glowing story you read about the "garage tech company" that grows into a sprawling billion-dollar business.
The horrible part is that The Onion posted it two weeks ago and Slashdot had to dredge it up to add some legit humour to this horrible April Fools day garbage on the front page :(
failed business stories (Score:5, Interesting)
Or the time I got into the business of a web site that would rate fine restaurants in large cities. We started in Chicago where we lived, and one of the partners insisted on spending $600 on flashy business cards (glossy, with embossed silver ink in the company name--1000 cards for each of the three founders. I used 2 of mine, total. Still have the other 998 because I'm a packrat). Then we stumbled along for a year putting together the site and doing legal stuff, only to realize that not a single restaurant wanted to pay for our services, primarily because no other restaurants were already customers. How do you get customers without having customers? There's probably a good answer, but about that time (2001) Zagat's got a few million in venture capital to go online and do everything we were doing and more. So we closed up shop, settled our bills (of which the business cards represented about 75%), and that was that.
There's also the web site about nothing that a friend and I started with the idea we'd make a mint selling people themselves (if we're nothing, anything we sell had to come from the visitor, right?), but we got so bogged down in artistic philosophy and bad puns (nothing's better! nothing to lose! much ado about nothing
I also once wrote a novel, which remains unpublished. I think it's a good novel. A distant family connection who works in editing gave it decent marks. Somehow I've never gotten around to polishing it up and actually submitting the darn thing anywhere.
I worked for some other guys, out of their basement, over the course of a year as they tried to start a "help people build online stores" franchise. The only customer was some neighbors who agreed to try it when we gave them the kit for free, and who then never did a thing with it. Literally zero minutes spent trying to use our stuff. Not that I blame them.
Same guys hired me to write a book for their online darts store. Book never sold any copies. They had a plan to offer it as a bonus reward for large orders, but then sold the darts store. Come to think of it, that might not be entirely a failure. Except one of the two guys had to give up his part-time basement job and start commuting an hour and a half each way every day, and I'd call that a pretty big disappointment on his part.
Same guys also had me start another online store. It sold some product, but the credit card fees were so ridiculous after a few months we realized we were actually losing money on every sale, so that had to go.
Then they started a dog frisbees store. Business was good, but the hosting company was so messed up when we tried to cancel a few other domains they simply canceled everything, and then held the site name hostage for thousands of dollars when we wanted it back.
Then they tried some other frisbee stores. Despite bountiful volumes of sales, neither they nor the shipper bothered to keep track of actual sales or profits--for a few months they kept all the money that came in, and then the shipper realized he was supposed to be getting reimbursed for the cost of shipping and the original cost of the frisbees he was buying to ship on their behalf. So he started keeping all of the money that came in, to make up for back payments, trying to calculate what was owed by weighing the stack of printed invoices and guessing at the number of pieces of paper and the average sales value. Last I heard, it had been 3 years, and they still hadn't gotten back up to even.
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At least this story made me seriously think WTF and even made me smile. A bit.
And with that it beat the rest of this year's April Fool's stories hands down. The rest wasn't even remotely funny. Let alone believable.
99% of all Start Ups (Score:3, Insightful)
Sadly this is the story of 99% of all start ups and home based businesses.
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Sure you can. You just need to be in the .1%.
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Except that 99% of successful businesses actually have a profit model, an actual plan, and require some sort of special skill or hard work on the part of the owner. So more like 10,000.
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Of course you can! If you'd like to get started, send me $20 to get your personalized business plan and marketing kit. If you order online you'll receive my free eBook! A $40 value!
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Like me. I'm so happy I could fold my company after three months! No one was interested in what I had to offer, and I learned that I much rather work for someone else than myself.
Typical "reality check" humor from The Onion (Score:5, Insightful)
More often than not, non-slapstick humor stems from insight, even if shallow. The Onion relies solidly on this effect and it may get old; I noticed their style before hovering my pointing-thingy over the fine link.
Now, this is a deserved slap in the face to the romantic visions we're in love with. Every year we dismburse large sums in movie theaters to see renditions of David-vs-Goliath, rags-to-riches, where the underdog wins through skill, perseverance or just being the good guy. Wake up and smell the (occassional) fail!
What's going on? (Score:3, Funny)
It took me time to realize this is "April Fool's Day." Dear editor, please warn members because it's quite frustrating to realise much later on that it's April Fool's day. Now I do not know which story to believe.
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Now I do not know which story to believe.
None of 'em. Seriously.
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You must be new here. Its been this way since the '90s. :)
-molo
Re:What's going on? (Score:5, Funny)
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Note to slashdot - preserve original data/time zone information for April fools crap.
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your better off just treating everything on the internet as a joke no matter what day it is.
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It took me time to realize this is "April Fool's Day." Dear editor, please warn members because it's quite frustrating to realise much later on that it's April Fool's day. Now I do not know which story to believe.
The story has been posted on 'Friday April 02, @01:58AM' on /. and the TFA has been posted on March 22, 2010. So, 'April Fool's day' joke does not apply to this article, IMHO.
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So all those IBM PC compatible systems that were sold with 640K RAM didn't exist either? You could have 8 sockets with 7x 4K RAM chips and 1x 4K ROM.
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Well, duh.
They used 32k of RAM in the machine, but 4k of that was used to make the screen display ASCII porn on power-on, so only 28k was available to users.
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There were 24 bit processors, 6 bit bytes, etc. Base 2 is every bit as flexible as base 10, it's just different, and conventions have evolved to make things consistent and easy.
For example, with a 24 bit processor, you'll want to scale to a 48 bit processor to make backwords compatibility easier. The 8 bit ba
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Sure. But breadboarding a computer with 1980 processors (8080, 6502) would have sucked if you picked some funny multiple. How many machines were ever built where you could have 28K? I can't remember one. 1980 you had lots of 16K and 32K and 64K machines, with Zilog Z80's, running CPM. There were a smattering of new, 8088's and the new 68000 was in mini-class workstations - these had, sometimes, a whopping 256Kb!
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I think my TI/99 had 48K after I upgraded it, IIRC. That's because it started with 16K, and then I added a 32K memory expansion unit.
I don't know how you'd get 28K (perhaps 4 + 8 + 16?), but there's nothing confining you to memory sizes that aren't a power of 2. Probably, the main reason most computers were like that (at least at the base specs) is because memory chips were always manufactured like that, and it's easier/cheaper to build a system with only a single memory chip or bank. Later on, if the us
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'Zactly.
I used to demo / sell personals in the 79-81 years. (GW-Basic?) Nothing had but 4 or 16 base. Commodore and Apple had 4Kb models (The PET!). There were Apple ][ expansion cards for PR4 from third parties, that gave you funny numbers like 12 Kb.
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"What multiple of 4 is 28?"
I know that one!, I know that one! It's (wait for it) 7!!!
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Yup. Let's put 14 sockets for 512b RAM chips, in our new PC!
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The Onion (Score:4, Insightful)
I always thought the Onion should post real news on April 1st, not that their rendition on the news is that far from the truth anyway. And not like this article is even from today.
eeerrraaaAAARRRGGGHHH!!! (Score:1)
Geek decides not to ignore Slashdot on April 1 (Score:1, Offtopic)
Redwood City, CA -- dateline. Geek who's been around for any longer than a couple years decides not to ignore Slashdot on April 1, and weed through all the lame jokes looking for actual, interesting stuff. Haha! April Fools!
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For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares?"
That's just evil.
It's the name (Score:1)
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PVP on Slashdot's Ass! (Score:1, Offtopic)
Slashdot editors - I will come to your house and battle you in PVP until I chop off your arms you sick sons a bitches.
Slashdot sucks on April Fools day (Score:1)
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I was talking to Slashdot and it said that YOU suck on April Fools day!
Meh (Score:1)
The Zaltair was a better joke (Score:2)
"Personal home computer"??!? (Score:2)
This isn't even a current Onion article (Score:2)
It's last week's news...
Attention all /. Staff: (Score:3, Informative)
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We have two Jumbo Onion pizzas, Onion juice, and Onion rings. Merry Christmas!
*their* first personal computer, not *the* first (Score:2)
The article says *their* first personal computer. In 1980, the Apple II was 3 years old and VisiCalc had been out for a year. Nobody was creating *the* first PC at that time.