Canon Cat for Sale

my brother was a regional apple rep ... and sometimes when he came into town there would be dinners with some of the apple people. i remember some dinners before mac was announced, having arguments about uses for mac ... which i somewhat characterized as mac advocates position was that macs would never be allowed for any other purpose than the kitchen table and never for any commercial purposes. i claimed that (at the time) such a position would mean that it be a constant money loosing proposition. my brother had a lot of business selling apple-IIs into all sorts of markets.

the ibm-pc argument was that it could be used for pc-based commercial applications ... as well as terminal emulation allowing single desk footprint for both mainframe connection as well as local (in large part business) computing. i was able to upgrade from home 3101 ascii terminal ... to ibm-pc with terminal emulation. misc. past posts about terminal emulation helping with uptake of ibm-pc ... and then later ... the terminal emulation install base somewhat inhibited the transition of of PCs to full peer-to-peer networking nodes

before the ibm-pc came along ... i tried to get my brother to help me with some form of terminal emulation using apple-II.

part of the objective was trying to get timely downloads of vmshare (off of tymshare) that i could upload and redistribute internally (there was nearly world-wide access to tymshare via various dial-up as well as tymnet)

however, eventually i was able to work a deal where a monthly vmshare dump tape from tymshare ... i then computed the changes and distributed the updates to numerous internal locations over the internal network

... of course one of the locations was the HONE system

which provided access to all sales, marketing and field people world-wide (although at the time, the consolidated US HONE datacenter was maybe 20 miles closer to the tymshare datacenter than i was).

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