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MARCH 12, 2007FEDERAL COMPUTER WEEK 2928 MARCH 12, 2007 FEDERAL COMPUTER WEEK

B Y S E A N G A L L A G H E R

The technology industry is like agoldfish. It somehow manages toadvance itself through the waterfrom year to year, but it seems tolack any memory. How else do youexplain phrases such as traditional

Web application, ormarketing people whotalk about virtualizationas though it were some-thing VMware inventedlast Tuesday at a wildcoding party?

Everything in infor-mation technology isderivative. And so, itseems, are the reasonswhy technology com-panies fail. A quick sur-

vey of advertisements from FederalComputer Week’s first two years ofpublication is like a walk through agraveyard of bad business deci-sions, technology dead ends andcorporate hubris.

But technology companies nev-er really die. They just get acquiredand become someone else’s legacyproblem.

THE COMPAQ/LORALTEMPEST-APPROVEDPORTABLEIf you knew what to look for, it was easy tospot Compaq Portable users in the late’80s. They had one arm slightly longer thanthe other from toting the closed contrap-tion some of us came to know as Satan’sSewing Machine.

The Loral-modified Compaq Portable286, like the Compaq Portable II it wasbased on, stretched the definition of theword portable. At almost 30 pounds andwith no battery, this device got lugged onlyas far as from one desk to another — or ifyou had an extension cord, not even thatfar.

But the Compaq Portable wasn’t intend-ed for light office work. With its integrated9-inch monitor, this was a machine for seri-ous engineering work. And in 1987, it wasn’t much of a stretch of the truth to ad-vertise that a 20M hard drive would be ide-al for large databases or complex engineer-ing programs.

MACHINEMEMORIES

View an onlineslide show of vin-tage advertise-ments from 20 years of Federal ComputerWeek issues atwww.fcw.com/specials/ads.

30 MARCH 12, 2007 FEDERAL COMPUTER WEEK

NANTUCKET’SCLIPPER DBASECOMPILERJust the word Clipper is enough tosend me into fits of nostalgia. Ihad dabbled in programming be-fore being introduced to Ashton-Tate’s dBase database softwareand the pseudocode compiler thata band of escaped Ashton-Tatedevelopers had devised. But itwas Clipper that turned me into adeveloper. Before Microsoft’s Vi-sual Basic, PowerSoft’s Power-Builder and Borland’s Delphi, thedBase and Clipper combinationbrought rapid database applica-tion development to the world.

It wasn’t made for multipleusers and the dBase program-ming language was a bit eccen-tric. But when I built my firsttrouble-ticket tracking systemwith Clipper, none of that mat-tered. All I knew was that it wasbetter than having to buy a dBaseIII license for every person whoused a database and worryingabout someone inadvertentlygetting to the dot prompt insteadof running the program.

Computer Associates — nowjust CA — acquired Nantucket, andClipper became CA-Clipper be-fore fading into the background.But for die-hard Clipper fans, itlives on in a number of open-source and commercial tools.

ADVERTISING HISTORY


THE ZENITH 248AND SCO XENIXIf you were in the Defense De-partment in the late ’80s andearly ’90s, you couldn’t go threefeet without tripping over aZ248. Aside from a little problemwith the monitors spontaneous-ly combusting, the things werenigh indestructible. Well afterthey had become obsolete — andafter Zenith had sold its comput-er business to Groupe Bull —those rugged metal boxes re-mained stacked in many a pas-sageway, waiting for some poorsoul to figure out how to get ridof them.

As a matter of course, theZ248 and its successor, theZ386, were natural targets forthe SCO Xenix, a variant of Unixthat Microsoft — ironicallyenough — created. Microsoft li-censed Unix from AT&T in 1979and created Xenix, a 16-bit portof Unix for Motorola and Intelprocessors. Microsoft eventual-ly passed on marketing and de-velopment of Xenix to the SantaCruz Operation.

One thing I distinctly remem-ber about my introduction toXenix and SCO in those days wasthat SCO had the best hold musicof any phone support line I hadcalled at the time. And it was agood thing, because I spent a lotof time listening to it.

ADVERTISING HISTORY


DATA GENERALThe Boston Red Sox may havebroken the Curse of the Bambinoin 2004, but another kind of cursewas put on Massachusetts’ Route128 Corridor in the late ’80s andearly ’90s. The technology giantsof the Boston beltway — Data Gen-eral, Digital Equipment, WangLaboratories and Apollo Computer— were overtaken by the humblePC.

By the time Data Generalplaced this ad in 1988, the writingwas on the wall for the company.It had missed the boat on the mi-crocomputer revolution, and Unixworkstations were making its 16-bit minicomputers obsolete. DGmade its own Unix workstationplay in 1989 with the release ofthe AViiON line and revolutionizeddisk storage with its CLARiiONdisk arrays.

But in the end, it didn’t matter.EMC acquired DG, and all that re-mains of the company’s legacy isthe CLARiiON brand name on stor-age arrays and the dg.com domainname.

ADVERTISING HISTORY


HAYESSMARTMODEMBack when the Internet was stillcalled ARPAnet by the few peo-ple who used it, we had modems.Some of you might still havethem in your laptops. One agencysite I worked at in 1991 hadshelves filled with nearly a hun-dred Hayes modems configuredto support remote connectionsto its terminal servers.

Hayes was a technologyleader in the realm of modems.The company invented the com-mand set that is used with mostmodems today. At about $1,100,the Hayes V-series Smartmodem9600 was the Cadillac of modemtechnology in 1988, offering9,600 bits/sec in both directionsat the same time. This was whatmodem geeks like me called fullduplex.

As Hayes started to lose itsedge in the business andmodems became more of a com-modity, the company made a beton the next big thing in data-comm — ISDN. In the early ’90s,that seemed like a pretty goodbet. But ISDN never took off inthe United States, and Hayesnever recovered its footing.Killed by DSL, the company wentbankrupt twice before it was fi-nally liquidated in 1999.

ADVERTISING HISTORY

MARCH 12, 2007FEDERAL COMPUTER WEEK 37

VM SOFTWARE When companies run ads such asthis — “It’s time we shed a little lighton what we’re up to”— and don’tmention any of their products, it’s asure sign that they aren’t quite surethemselves. With the world runningas quickly as possible away frommainframes, VM Software found it-self in just that situation.

VM Software made data centermanagement software for IBM’s VMmainframe environment, includingstorage and backup managementtools. Its VM:Backup and VM:Direc-tor were — and still are — well-re-garded technology. And with IBMfinding all sorts of ways to keep thez Series systems and VM kicking —even handling virtual Linux ses-sions — there’s a whole new set ofuses for such products.

Although VM Software’s prod-ucts are still alive, VM Software it-self has gone to where it seems allniche technology companies gowhen they die — into the belly of CA.This ad mentioned the company’sefforts to move into multioperating-system networked environments,but VM Software didn’t quite sur-vive the move because it couldn’tcompete with companies such asCA or Tivoli.


TOSHIBA In 1988, selling anything with theToshiba name to the U.S. govern-ment was a challenge, to put itmildly. In 1987, Toshiba wascharged with selling technology tothe Russian Navy’s shipyards tomake their submarines’ propellersquieter and harder for U.S. sonarto detect. Some estimated thatToshiba’s perfidy would cost theUnited States more than $30 bil-lion to restore its strategic edge.

Two senior executives atToshiba were arrested, and theU.S. government imposed sanc-tions on the company. The DefenseDepartment froze all its existingcontracts with Toshiba. The Housepassed a resolution that bannedthe sale of Toshiba products atbase exchanges, and severalmembers of Congress held aToshiba product-bashing party.

Toshiba undertook a massivecampaign to apologize for thecompany’s transgression, and theattention of politicians swervedelsewhere.

However, given the institution-al memory at many governmentagencies — especially at DOD —even now it’s not exactly a levelplaying field. But at least Toshibais still in business.

ADVERTISING HISTORY

Gallagher is editorial director ofTechTarget’s Channel Media Group.

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