The Rise and Fall of the General Electric Coporation Computer Department (1995) [pdf]

> IBM sent people around to talk to us, and they were simply the wrong people. Initially they sent marketing big shots, who didn't understand anything technical at all. ... They sent technical people, who just had the attitude, "You tell us what you want, and we'll do it for you. We're the technical people" ... We couldn't communicate with those guys.

Sounds like product managers, like the Tom Smykowski character from Office Space, are important after all.

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that GE, at the time, saw computing like electrical power or tap water and wanted to deliver mainframe time sharing to people's terminal through high speed connections. They even asked the bell lab guys to write multics for that (which Thompson and Ritchie parodied with Unix).

They basically imagined the "cloud" 50 years too early.

GE computers still have a legacy today, in the form of the GECOS field in Unix(like) /etc/passwd files.

Towards the end there's an interesting table that shows IBM had almost grown to the size of GE by 1964, several years before the introduction of their famous system 360.

Company GE IBM

Revenues 64,052 M 60,109 M

Earnings 5,155 M 4,726 M

Coporation

BTW, what makes the pictures in the paper wildly dithered like that?

tl;dr But I did search for the word "Xerox" and didn't find it.

No, not that Xerox computer. The Sigma 7 timesharing computers from SDS, which they bought in 1969 and shut down in 1975. GE was running those on a contract for the Defense Department on some overseas spy bases.

That's why my brother Bill in this article was in Thailand:

https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/coming-to-america