[GreenKeys] Teletype Corp. History circa 1960

[Jim Haynes]

On Thu, 16 Mar 2023, Robert Nickels wrote:

> I'd say it was a classic example of "The Innovator's Dilemma" as described in 
> Clayton Christensen's book of that name.   He observed that oftentimes the 
> large dominant companies in an industry are unable to re-invent themselves 
> quickly enough to take advantage of new disruptive technologies, and instead

Another factor here is the "outer" technology.  Teletype could dominate
the mechanical teleprinter market because of its huge investment in
production machinery and skill in inventing and manufacturing complicated
mechanical devices.

By the time we got integrated circuits, any small company in a garage
could build CRT terminals as easily as a big company.  At UCSC we
even built a few of our own in-house with off-the-shelf parts.  We
looked at some of the Teletype CRT terminals, but they didn't seem to
have anything to offer that we couldn't get from a number of other
terminal vendors at the time.

Teletype and a number of other companies tried to beat the game by
manufacturing their own custom ICs in-house.  Some heroic things were
accomplished but in the end you can't get ahead that way unless you are
going to make millions of circuits.  And nowadays you'd probably still
be ahead to buy off-the-shelf FPGAs.  Or at any rate designing the
chips and having them made by a silicon foundry.