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Cyhist Jul 19 1996 G
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Seven to eight years ago
Sender: Brad Thompson Subject: RE: CM> Origins of word "vaporware."
Seven to eight years ago, I knew for certain of two companies that
practiced this. One I was working for and the other my room mate was
working for. I will describe each in turn:
Although I believe the company is completely belly up, I won't give the
name of the company. I might as well be safe.
There were a total of five people in the development department. Two
hardware engineers, three software engineers. My boss (one of the
hardware engineers) decided that he wanted a Voice Recognition system
for the IBM PC running as a Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) program
running under MS-DOS. We already had some Voice Recognition hardware and
software systems for the Apple, Atari and the Commodore 64. Jack (names
changed to protect the innocent) and I had never worked on the IBM
before, so we had to learn a lot of things from scratch. It took us nine
months, but we came out with a credible program - a 64K TSR that was
compatible with quite a few programs on the market. In other words, it
would add voice recognition to your favorite text editor. Our closest
competitor had a 256K program that didn't work half as well as ours. Our
program did need some improvements, especially in the User interface. So
we played around with it for another 4 months and came up with version
1.1. The company started selling quite a few copies. At this point,
marketing got into the act and started advertising version 2.0 with
lot's of stuff, including expanded memory support, the whole nine yards.
Well, I was getting a little tired of the company (I won't bore you with
the details), so I moved on. The marketing people still kept advertising
version 2.0, and even took Visa orders for the product! The programmer
that replaced me played with it for 6 months, then quit. The programmer
after him played with it for two years! After 2.5 years, they finally
come out with a bloated 2.0 version. However the market was no longer
interested in it.
I am less sure of the second story however, I believe this is correct as
to the facts.
A friend of mine worked at a company writing Atari ST programs. He wrote
a spreadsheet program for this company, but really wasn't being
compensated very well for what he was working on. Plus working
conditions were not the best. Anyway, he was just able to get himself to
finish the spread sheet program when his boss brings him in a copy of a
major trade rag. He shows him a big full page ad with his program listed
prominently, PLUS an Editor, a Database program, and a Word Processor.
Probably the first advertised "Suite" of office products. However the
other three didn't exist, and my friend was the only real programmer for
the company!
When my friend quit, the company lasted about six months and went
chapter 11.
Brad Thompson.
______________________________________________________________________
Sender: Brad Thompson Subject: RE: CM> Origins of word "vaporware."
Seven to eight years ago, I knew for certain of two companies that
practiced this. One I was working for and the other my room mate was
working for. I will describe each in turn:
Although I believe the company is completely belly up, I won't give the
name of the company. I might as well be safe.
There were a total of five people in the development department. Two
hardware engineers, three software engineers. My boss (one of the
hardware engineers) decided that he wanted a Voice Recognition system
for the IBM PC running as a Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) program
running under MS-DOS. We already had some Voice Recognition hardware and
software systems for the Apple, Atari and the Commodore 64. Jack (names
changed to protect the innocent) and I had never worked on the IBM
before, so we had to learn a lot of things from scratch. It took us nine
months, but we came out with a credible program - a 64K TSR that was
compatible with quite a few programs on the market. In other words, it
would add voice recognition to your favorite text editor. Our closest
competitor had a 256K program that didn't work half as well as ours. Our
program did need some improvements, especially in the User interface. So
we played around with it for another 4 months and came up with version
1.1. The company started selling quite a few copies. At this point,
marketing got into the act and started advertising version 2.0 with
lot's of stuff, including expanded memory support, the whole nine yards.
Well, I was getting a little tired of the company (I won't bore you with
the details), so I moved on. The marketing people still kept advertising
version 2.0, and even took Visa orders for the product! The programmer
that replaced me played with it for 6 months, then quit. The programmer
after him played with it for two years! After 2.5 years, they finally
come out with a bloated 2.0 version. However the market was no longer
interested in it.
I am less sure of the second story however, I believe this is correct as
to the facts.
A friend of mine worked at a company writing Atari ST programs. He wrote
a spreadsheet program for this company, but really wasn't being
compensated very well for what he was working on. Plus working
conditions were not the best. Anyway, he was just able to get himself to
finish the spread sheet program when his boss brings him in a copy of a
major trade rag. He shows him a big full page ad with his program listed
prominently, PLUS an Editor, a Database program, and a Word Processor.
Probably the first advertised "Suite" of office products. However the
other three didn't exist, and my friend was the only real programmer for
the company!
When my friend quit, the company lasted about six months and went
chapter 11.
Brad Thompson.
______________________________________________________________________
