When it comes to 80s computer brands, few flew as high as Eagle Computer flew in 1983. The aptly named company was selling 12,000 computers a month and had been doubling sales every quarter under the leadership of a talented CEO. Then Eagle lost its CEO, Dennis Barnhart, in a crashed Ferrari on the day of its IPO, June 8, 1983. In this blog post, we’ll explore the reasons Eagle Computer fell, because there was more to it than just the tragic story involving its CEO.
↫ Dave Farquhar
Just one of the many early PC companies that died off, even if Eagle died off before many of the other big players. It must’ve been such a vibrant and fascinating time to be into PCs and computers in general at that time, with so many companies and players to choose from.
Shame about the 308 GTS.
“It must’ve been such a vibrant and fascinating time to be into PCs and computers in general at that time, with so many companies and players to choose from.”
I can say that “without a doubt” that yes, I ABSOLUTELY was a fascinating time to be into PCs and computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
I had a science class in junior high where the teacher brought in his cash register style computer. I call it that because the only output of ANY kind was paper. Our science teacher tried to get us interested into writing ANY program for it and I wrote a tic-tac-toe program for it which was pretty lame in the beginning because anyone could beat it. But by the time I was done with that program, the BEST you could do was tie it. Even the smartest people in my class, some of which went onto getting PHDs in physics, another became a rocket scientist for Boeing, another became an internationally ranked chess player. And my school was just an average high school and not some private institution for brilliant kids. Oh, and another worked for Industrial Light & Magic for more than 25 years. And THEY couldn’t beat my tic-tac-toe program so I know it that it was good. Not that I was (or am) ANYWHERE near as smart as they were or are.
I stumbled into computer programming after my parents sent me to college but I have one of those brains where it takes me three seconds to be bored in lectures. I set YouTube to play at 1.75 times normal speed so that I don’t get bored and move onto something else. So college was NOT for me.
But then someone suggested that I check out a technical/vocational school in downtown and I went there and ended up signing up for a “go at your own pace” computer programming class. This was in February of 1980 where I learned how to program in COBOL, RPG, FORTRAN, of course BASIC and any other language I could get my hands on during those two years (I ended up learning seven programming languages).
Anyway, my first job as a computer programmer was for a mortgage company. A year and a half after I started working there they sold our main frame (an HP 3000) which I loved and told us that it was being “hauled out” six months to the day from when we were told and we had to:
1) Learn to program in C
2) Learn how to boot up a PC running DOS (we had never seen one at that point)
3) Learn everything that we needed to know about settings up PCs including network drivers
4) Convert all our COBOL programs (about 70 including our biggest one which was an (A)automated (L)oan (P)rocessing (S)ystem which we called “Alps” for “writing up” mortgage loans. Our bank had over 250 different loan types that we created loans for and we had to have our C program be able to process ANY of those. Plus our accounting software, our “after you signed your mortgage loan” software, meaning the first programs I ever wrote which was for processing the payments people made on their mortgage loans and how I got my job in the first place. Plus the investor software where we had our software look for specific loan types that investors wanted to buy from us and then we would collect and process the payments for the loans, take a processing fee and send the rest of the money to the investor. We were then able to take the money we got from them and create new loans for customers.
5) We also had to go to 12 remote locations and setup all the computers our Home Loan Centers needed to create new loans
6) Of course we had to learn how to setup and do everything with the PC servers
7) Everything else you need to do to support PCs.
We had a TOTAL of FOUR of us in our “Data Processing” department which now days is called IT. Two of us were programmers, one maintained the mainframe and then left the bank, and the fourth was a trainer who helped go around training people how to use the computers and the software, but along with programming I was responsible for taking EIGHT PCs, monitors, keyboards, mice, power cords, network cables (coax ethernet until 1987 when we started switching to twisted pair ethernet, the kind that everyone uses now) and go out to the remote locations and teach people how to use computers by having them play solitaire. Then I started teaching them how to use Alps (automated loan processing system) plus Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet and WordPerfect. Of course we were running DOS since Windows (losedows) didn’t exist yet.
My boss and I worked fourteen or more hours per day for those six months (and never got a bonus of ANY kind) to learn PCs and convert the software and train the users and everything we needed to do, while STILL maintaining the main frame software because life didn’t stop and just allow us to focus 100% on the PCs.
I had a two month period where I literally slept in a sleeping bag on the board room table, never going home or anywhere else for those two months. My wife brought me my meals (my boss’s wife did the same) and we LITERALLY lived at work for the final two months before the mainframe went away and we honestly didn’t think we would finish in time but we did and there are things that I STILL can’t get out of my mind that I learned back then that I couldn’t use three months later after updates replaced what I had learned so we had to learn some things totally over after we switched from DOS 1.x to 2.x.
It was UGLY (DOS) and amazing at the same time. I STILL hate DOS and Windows with a passion after using more than over 50 other totally different operating systems, quite a few that are FAR superior that only people that read OS/News would have even heard of. Unfortunately most of those OSs are no longer with us and I’ll not go into that now.
DESPITE DOS and Windows, it was an amazing time to be alive and to the things that I did from 1977 through 1985. I can say “despite” because I’ve spent more than a thousand hours using CP/M which DOS was a COMPLETE rip-off of. Microsoft had to pay Digital Research millions of dollars because of it which was a pittance of what they should have had to pay them. Yes, I’m VERY well versed in the history of Who, What, Where, Why and How of that time period. I LIVED IT and being in Seattle I was literally IN that in that I also CP/M during that time because I wanted to know what we missed out on where we could have been using software that didn’t have a CEO that was a sociopath.
After those six months of learning how to get around all the warts of DOS I wondered what else was out there so once I finally could get my head up and look around, I bought surplussed computers from the bank and built a home network with four network topologies with five different network operating systems and all six of my PCs both dual booted three OSs from the hard drive PLUS booting up from floppy discs into operating systems.
I then got equivalent software for all the PCs operating systems that ran on PCs (I couldn’t afford those PLUS non PCs since I didn’t work for a bank that believed in bonuses or valuable stock options but I also didn’t sell my soul to the devil either). I then created a spreadsheet that listed all the OSs and all the programs that I tested to see what features they had and how fast they did them and DOS/Windows didn’t come out looking very good at all.
But Microsoft was smart and went after CEOs that didn’t have a clue about the quality of computers and the software they ran and did a VERY good job of convincing them to buy Microshit … I mean soft so we ended up with the “stuff” that most people use with them thinking that computers SHOULD crash and freeze up and have bloated CPU sucking software on them because they are scared to use anything “different”. It’s like thinking of any car (like a Yugo) that was very cheaply built and that is what everyone thought was a good car and they were afraid to buy anything else so that is what everyone ended up buying and driving when there are VERY good to EXCELLENT options that existed THEN and a very short time later.
DESPITE the OS and NOS that we used, it was an AMAZING time to be alive and learning about computers. Though again, the most fun I had was using NON Microsoft OSs and I’m very happy to say that at home I only used a Microsoft OS for a year and then switched to other OSs for home and never looked back. But the main OSs that I used and supported and wrote programs for at work were Microsoft. And I __ADMIT__ that fear kept me working for that bank for 11 years and then another organization for 26 more that used Microsoft OSs. Those fears were based on things that happened to my dad where he and my mom lost EVERYTHING three times before sticking with a job he hated (like me) for security of employment. My parents and I both ended up doing well in the end.
I’ve been retired since May of 2023 after basically 40 years of programming and PCs with MANY different OSs and NOSs including and since AFTER 1998 until now I never owned a PC. But now I’m getting into PCs again (I’m not liking where Apple has been going) with OS/2 (yes, OS/2 – https://www.arcanoae.com/) and Haiku (not the poems but the OS (https://www.haiku-os.org/) and other OSs.
OS/2 because when the beta for OS/2 2.0 came out, that is when the rain clouds parts and the sun rays came through and everywhere around me was green and vibrant with life that was heaven to me. For six years (home PCs) life was heaven for me. And then IBM said they were not going to maintain and support OS/2 anymore and life got VERY DARK and I got so mad that I thought about quitting my job and buying property in remote Alaska and cutting myself off from the world. But fears based on what happened to my dad caused me to stay where I was (including being married) and while I HATED the OS I supported and wrote programs for, I LOVED the people I supported and I LOVED the programming projects that I was doing on the side which kept my love of programming alive.
Unfortunately I’m having problems with my memory which is NOT Alzheimers but is “something else” which they are still trying to figure out and to see if they (doctors) can help me not lose much more. Programming has become a real challenge now because I have to CONSTANTLY look at manuals to find even any function that will allow me to do what I want to do, though I often can’t figure out things that USED to be super simple for me. It’s EXTREMELY frustrating when you think you remember a function only to find that it stopped “being a thing” 10 or 15 years ago (or more) but no longer exists. WHICH EXPLAINS a LOT about why I’m going back to using OS/2 because too often THAT is what I remember. It’s EXTREMELY frustrating beyond words! And too often the software I used back then and bought licenses for home, well I threw them out in anger in the late 1990s so I don’t have them anymore and have to settle for what I can find that I can download and use.
That spreadsheet where I compared all those OSs? Those discs don’t work anymore. I can’t get ANY data off of them. I’m not even sure if they are the right discs and I don’t have those PCs or the hard drives, only the 3.5″ and 5 ¼” discs, and only about 600 to 700 of them compared to well over three thousand I USED to have where I threw them into the garbage out of anger at IBM for what they stopped doing with OS/2. Oh well … life … goes … on. Doesn’t it. Ugh!
Oh, and I’m still looking to try to find any of the 3.5″ discs that I had with my Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet where I had entered ALL of the data for ALL of the Advanced Second Edition Dungeons and Dragons into a spreadsheet. Then I created a automated character sheet where you could enter an item Armor, Sword, shield, spell, etc., into the character sheet and it would find it and it would pull that info into the character sheet. Instead of spending over an hour to FULLY fill out a character sheet I could do it in less than 10 minutes. And I could even run an adventure off that spreadsheet file because it could do all the calculations for each round during combat no matter how many Player Characters or “monsters” there were. Each had their own sheet which I could quickly build (including for monsters, no matter how many, no matter how many kinds) where I would setup individual sheets for each player character and each monster for every scenarios that I was running them through, all prepared ahead of time so that little time was wasted waiting for anyone to calculate anything or figure out what did what.
I’m working on an adventure program which will never get polished enough to release which will have three dimensional people in towns with each having jobs and home lives where life “exists” in towns and cities so that you can talk and communicate with anyone getting at least little bits of info about where “monsters” are or what they are selling instead of the barely at best 2 dimensional experience you have in computer games with non player characters. But then my memory is making this hard to do, not to mention it would be hard anyway. But that is the stuff that I apparently love to do.
Sabon,
You can manually brute force every possibility in Tic Tac Toe in a minute or so. History buffs will remember that Tic Tac Toe’s unwinnability against a competent adversary saved humanity from nuclear apocalypse in the 1980s.
“Wargames Ending”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s93KC4AGKnY
Youtube started in 2005 and wouldn’t have been around for people of “college age” in the 80s. IMHO looking back at my education the most value one gets from university isn’t anything one learns exclusively from classes, which can be replicated at home. Rather it’s 1) a piece of paper to pass employer screening, and 2) strong business connections. I wish I had realized earlier how important those connections would be because I did not adequately build up a professional network for access to better jobs.
I hear you. This is very common in IT. So so so many unpaid overtime hours.
Fortunately I never slept at work, but working till 10PM or 11PM wasn’t that unusual during critical periods. And it was non other than Bill Gates who successfully lobbied congress in the 90s to exempt developers from legal overtime pay. If the world were fair, $50B would be deducted from him and redistributed to those who actually earned it. Fucker.
I was in the microsoft ecosystem for the beginning of my career and I think it was decent in the win2k and xp era with some tweaking. Admittedly I was drawn to linux many years ago for unrelated reasons, however I can’t get over just how bad it’s gotten. I support clients on windows because I have to and even things in microsoft’s wheelhouse that should be their bread and butter are buggy as hell. Just today there was an issue activating an MS365 subscription and we were getting “Unknown error, please try again later” clicking microsoft activation links….nothing worked and it has yet to be resolved. It’s like modern microsoft products are in perpetual beta.
I honestly think IBM is the reason microsoft won, instantly giving them the defacto top spot despite DOS being technologically behind others. I believe that if microsoft had to independently compete on their own merits, they would not have lasted as long.
Good for you using what you enjoy. I have a hard time even imagining retirement as a possibility, ever. Working till death.
May seem a bit silly but staying proficient at a language may require regular exercise like an athlete. Even languages I used daily for years become fuzzy when I leave them on the back burner for too long.
Haha, that’s true. I copied most software I used to a hard disk, which I kept migrating every time I upgraded….so in theory I should still have most of it. Although in the past decade I had an occasion to try some of it again and discovered that not all of it would run on modern versions of windows, like software I had written in VB that I wanted to show my kids.. So to get those running again might require older versions of windows.
Haha….if I was free to stop working, I’d probably focus on creating my own universe simulator 🙂 That’s apparently what’s fun for me 🙂