Xref: utzoo comp.misc:5622 rec.humor:20113 Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!ames!ll-xn!adelie!mirror!garison From: garison@mirror.UUCP (Gary Piatt) Newsgroups: comp.misc,rec.humor Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore Summary: Wholesale clearance of useless computer equipment Message-ID: <24510@mirror.UUCP> Date: 22 Mar 89 17:45:17 GMT References: <864@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> <2047@tank.uchicago.edu> <36549@vax1.tcd.ie> <669@maths.tcd.ie> <15759@cup.portal.com> Reply-To: garison@prism.TMC.COM (Gary Piatt) Distribution: na Organization: (Dis-) Lines: 34 Ronald J. Notarius writes: =>I received a COMB catalog in yesterday's mail. In it they advertise a Lisa 2. =>Yes, a Lisa 2! At one time costing over $10,000, now only $999! I used to work for Visual Technology, a company that was growing faster than crabgrass until they decided to jump on the PC bandwagon. They went into hock purchasing a company that made a (very bad) PC clone they called the "Commuter". Nobody in the marketplace trusted Visual's reputation as it applied to PCs, so very few people actually *bought* the Commuters. For the most part, the Commuters sat on shelves in the stockroom, being sold in dribs and drabs. After a while (a *long* while), Visual wised up and stopped producing the Commuters. Well, along came JVC, the wholesale clearance house. They knew a mediocre thing when they saw it, so they ordered 10,000 Commuters, to sell at way below cost. The problem was, Visual didn't *have* 10,000 Commuters, so they had to stop production of the things that were actually making money and retool the production line to crank out thousands of Commuters that weren't going to generate any profit. What seemed like a good way to clean out the stockroom turned into a fiasco: they lost money building the extra Commuters, and they missed the deadlines on the equipment they *should* have been making. Personally, I would have burned the silly things and collected the insurance. -Garison- =========================================================================== My attorney (who costs me a pretty penny) says I should add this disclaimer: This is by no means intended to besmirch the already-tarnished character of Visual Technology. They were a good, progressive company that produced high-quality ASCII terminals. They just made some mistakes in the past several years. This was one of them.