Life was fine in '79 . . .

[joeekaitis]

. . . especially if you were one of the 50 lucky geeks and nerds Xerox assembled in a secluded research bunker in Palo Alto, California to peer into the future of the office (never mind the living room and college dorm) and make it a reality. Too bad, as Steve Jobs memorably pointed out "There were a bunch of copier-heads" who never brought their innovations to market, even though they took the trouble to produce a minute-long TV commercial for a product they never intended to sell.

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[ovrphil]

love this ad - imagine what IBM, Xerox(especially) and RCA could have done with their ideas that were dismissed or not developed with some imagination of future importance. Like DOS, spreadsheets, mouse and other ideas..the Japanese did well with the LCD idea ...washer and dryer technology was different, I think.

 

[whirlcool]

Reminds me of the PROFS/Officevision mainframe system that IBM had in the 80's, just before PC's for the office came out. I believe it was a subset of CICS.

 

[kimball455]

PROFS

I used IBM PROFS for many years. It ran under VM (Virtual Machine) and communicated to dumb terminals using CMS (Conversational Monitoring System). VM allowed each user to think they had their own computer and operate independently of all of the other users of the single mainframe that was running the VM system.