Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!necntc!dandelion!ulowell!sky!harri
From: harri@sky.COM (Harri Rautiainen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.dec.micro
Subject: Re: Satire
Message-ID: <238@sky.COM>
Date: 8 Apr 88 16:23:08 GMT
References: <14630@oddjob.UChicago.EDU>
Reply-To: harri@sky.cs.ulowell.edu (Harri Rautiainen)
Distribution: na
Organization: SKY Computers, Lowell MA
Lines: 22


Your satire hits home pretty accurately. DEC had problems in
positioning the Rainbow. Early on it was intended to
"naive end-users" instead of traditional "sophisticated DEC-users".
(The sophisticated users should have embraced the Pro300 in no time at
all.)

I moved from traditional DEC world into a product management job
in DEC's Rainbow group. (It was a lot of fun and a lot of hard work in
an entrepreneurial team, which was totally different from the rest of
Digital. A lot of good people and good engineers.)
Anyways, I had to fight constantly the sentiment of treating the readers
of manuals as pre-schoolers. E.q., I thought that the VT240 emulation
users are more concerned about the particular implementation details
and differences to "real terminals" than which way to insert the
diskette into drive B:. (I should go back to the document to find out, if
I won or lost that battle.)

Later the reality sank in: Rainbows were bought (more than half a
million shipped) mostly by traditional DEC customers,
and often used connected to a VAX.

thanks for bringing back some fond memories,