Re:Ask HN: Tell how a startup/product died for a stupid or u...
by h2odragon on Saturday July 24, 2021 @03:27PM
(#27943746)
In the age of fax machines, we had a DOS TSR app that essentially did background UUCP style file transfers; with a couple of UI frontends for email-ish messaging and file transfer. (Yes, "multitasking" in 15kb, it dribbled stuff out on the timer interrupt)
The stack of ideas for using the basic capability was tall; we had plans for all sorts of things; but we needed to do a heavy round of actual beta testing because DOS.
Take the notion to the CEO for signoff; he says "what? people have to leave their computers on all the time for this? no one is going to do that!" and cancels the whole project.
I heard someone actually bought the code from them later, right about the time Windows finally got an official TCP/IP stack. Whoever that was, I pity them. Nasty ASM code.
The stack of ideas for using the basic capability was tall; we had plans for all sorts of things; but we needed to do a heavy round of actual beta testing because DOS.
Take the notion to the CEO for signoff; he says "what? people have to leave their computers on all the time for this? no one is going to do that!" and cancels the whole project.
I heard someone actually bought the code from them later, right about the time Windows finally got an official TCP/IP stack. Whoever that was, I pity them. Nasty ASM code.