Re: Competition : TP v Omnibook

[Randal Whittle <rwhittle@usa.net>]

At 10:50 PM 9/14/97 HST, David Ross wrote:
>> >Mac came along), while their early Vectra PC-compatibles were painfully
>> >proprietary.
>> 
>> If you think they're proprietary, look at Compaq.
>
>At least Compaq can run MSDOS out of the box.  As I recall the Vectras,
>they ran CPM-86 OK, but spoke a very strange dialect of DOS (even
>wierder than the one the Sanyos ran).

	Hmmm...may be true of the very early Vectras, but I don't think so.

	My father had a Vectra about 2 years after they first came out and it was
a great machine (though it had its quirks)--at the time, running MS DOS 3.x.

	What I had in mind as far as "proprietary" were little things.  For
instance, it had an ESDI hard drive that, when I went to put a new (bigger)
ESDI drive in it, the existing HP controller wouldn't/couldn't handle it.
For that matter, the existing ESDI drive ending up not being able to work
with any *other* ESDI controller!  It was like that drive and that
controller were joined at the hip.

	Another thing was the HP IB Mouse.  They had their own mouse interface
that connected by a port that looked something like a phone plug connector.
 It was neat, and Microsoft put Windows support in for it, but the bottom
line is that it belonged to HP.  And some other software packages just
didn't support it--I installed OS/2 onto that machine (version 1.x at that
that time) and had zero mouse control because OS/2 didn't support that HP
mouse.


-------
Randal J. Whittle		whittle@usc.edu	(213) 740-7775
Director, Electronic Commerce Program
Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California