From: Paul Cockshott (wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK)
Date: Sat Apr 28 2007 - 18:09:44 EDT
No, the one I did was for the US market and I licensed it to Centronic ( a printer company ) who were going to use it there. We selected a Hungarian designed 3 inch disk which was in competition with the sony and hitachi ones. The Hungarian one never caught on in competition with the others. Just after our disk was launched in the USA Sinclair withdrew from the market and Centronic reneged on their royalties. Never had much success with marketing inventions. The Orange video phone, which was the first on the market used some of my patents, but it turned out that they just wanted to announce it to boost their sale price before they floated and never put it into general production. It is hard to take an invention and turn it into a successfull firm unless you are willing to commit yourself wholehartedly to capitalism. The difference is that the Apple guys wanted to be capitalists and went out and set up a company, I wanted to be an intellectual and did not want to commit myself to a life of running a company. Paul Cockshott www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc -----Original Message----- From: OPE-L on behalf of Ian Wright Sent: Sat 4/28/2007 12:11 AM To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Subject: Re: [OPE-L] Reliability of price channel - personal computer industry > I saw his design and attempted to market a similar 5 chip controller for the Sinclair > spectrum, where the cost constraints were much tighter even than for Apple. The Sinclair Spectrum was my first computer, so I have a lot of nostalgia about it. Paul, although this is only one of your many achievements, I have to say it impresses me the most! In the 80's I purchased an external floppy disk drive for my Spectrum from royalties I earnt from published computer games. Knocking out machine code programs and then saving them to magnetic tape on a home cassette recorder was very time consuming. A disk drive was a real leap forward for Spectrum home computing. I wonder if my disk drive used your invention? Best, -Ian.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Apr 30 2007 - 00:00:17 EDT