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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty obvious from the accounts of the partners he worked with that he was a straight forward guy who did the opposite of what you suggest. If you read the story, he got a detail wrong, it wasn't due to an immediate bankruptcy of the railway, but a strike that eventually let to the bankruptcy of the railway operator. In any case, the computer did not get to its destination in time. We don't know if it ever got there or not as it had become irrelevant to the story.

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Nit: Railway Express Agency was intimately connected with railroad infrastructure, but it was not actually a railway. It was, essentially, FedEx, only using railways for transport instead of their own planes.

Or: why I still drive to a lot of customer on-site visits, so I can take the hardware with me personally.

When your company is running out of money and this is the only thing that can save you, you may do desperate things.

The reason it stood out was that he was flying himself to the meeting, so why did he ship the package separately if it was so important?

Anyhow it is unprovable so we can go with his reputation.

> The reason it stood out was that he was flying himself to the meeting, so why did he ship the package separately if it was so important?

It wasn't an iPhone you can just stick in your pocket. The thing weighed almost 150 lbs and looked something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

I wouldn't want to be seen in an airport with the 3 other people you'd need carrying that thing around.

Funny story about that. The folks who build the Amiga prototype didn't want to take any chances shipping it to CES, or putting it in checked luggage. So they bought their computer its own seat on the airplane with them:

http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/pillow.html

It's not 150 LBS, even fully kitted out (which wasn't possible at the time!), but it definitely didn't fit in the luggage compartment. The first portable to do that was the Osborne :P

His history shows that he did not compromise his integrity to gain a momentary advantage, so I doubt he'd have succumbed in that instance. He understood those things have a tendency to backfire. It's a different world now. That was towards the end of the era where deals could be done with a handshake.

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