Comment by Torwald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Torwald | Hacker News Reader

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They definitely had the engineering talent.

Atari, Commodore, Digital, Digital Research, were lacking the management talent.

They had the nicest gear, but the suits botched it primetime. That's why I drink.

Now, more to the point of the parent: Sun and SGI had the management talent. They had a good run. But that run ended anyway. At some point they run out of ideas to compete with "industry standard" hardware.

So, to come to the point of the parent: would a very successful Atari UNIX station, based on the 68030 made a difference?

NeXT used the 68k processors as well. And Apple. Even with the Mac's success the PowerPC eventually run out of steam against Intel. Would an additional load of many, many Ataris made a difference here?

What did ARM do differently than all of those mentioned above?

> Atari, Commodore, Digital, Digital Research, were lacking the management talent.

There isn't much they could have done. The good-enough x86 PC steamroller would have crushed them anyway. When the cheap average PC you could buy had VGA and a Sound Blaster, these platforms quickly ran out of gas in the gaming space.

If, and that's a big if, both Commodore and Atari managed to get cheap Unix (or Coherent) workstations out, at prices similar to PCs (which were generally more expensive), they could, perhaps, carve themselves a second niche as cheap Unix workstations.

ARM and its licensees stayed focused on embedded after walking away from the Acorn machines. Power usage became their focus. And so they were right there as pretty much the only good option when the portable and embedded market blew up.

So now with that under the belt it can return to desktop.

IIRC, ARM was low-power from the start. I remember the story of a board with one of the first ARM CPUs, that powered up even though Vcc was not connected. It was working from leaked current from the other signals being fed into the processor.

In an alternative universe where IBM would have succeed in preventing the reverse engineering done by Compaq, they could very well had survived.

It was the PC clone market that killed them, more than management errors.

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