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Not the DEC Rainbow I Used!

richard.s 27th Aug 2010

In the early 1980s, I inherited an ex-management DEC Rainbow. It was rather different from the description in this article and also more interesting.

Previously, there had been many business programs which ran on the CP/M operating system; lots of "IT experts" claimed that the new-fangled MS DOS would fail because of the lack of useful business program to run on it.

So, my DEC Rainbow had two different CPUs in the same case: Intel to run MS DOS programs; Zilog Z80 to run CP/M programs.

Then, Lotus launched 1 2 3 for MS DOS...

Perhaps DEC, and the people who bought Rainbows, had made the mistake of believing IT Experts?

At that time there were lots of compatibility problems with non IBM MS DOS PCs; the Rainbow was not alone.

Also at about that time, our new CEO chose a new business program for his managers: This ran only on Apple Macs so he bought a dozen Apple Macs purely to run that one project management program.

Good IT is really about satisfying a business need.