wow fascinating. I haven't read either nor have I been to the computer museum in the bay (I know I know ... I should like, be on the board or something)
First-hand industry and machine documentation of the pre-micro era. I've been working on a narrative recently of what I call a time-sharing crash in the early 1970s.
I don't know if that's much to go on simply because finance worked differently in that era and was relatively crash free in the modern sense until Reagan's deregulations and 1987's black monday.
I'm not a professional economist and the computer industry was very insular at the time but looking historically there appears to be a cluster of thematic bankruptcies, mergers, acquisitions and industry departures (such as GE getting out of computers selling its division to honeywell in 1970) that I think you can coin the idea of a "time-sharing crash" somewhere in the early 1970s.
It has all the dynamics. A new adjacent industry came out right after it (microcomputers), a migration of industrial centers (this is when boston's route 128 really started taking a backseat to silicon valley) and there were firesale style selloffs in the mid-70s of timesharing systems in the backs of magazines like computerworld from aspiring smaller firms that came in on a hype but were too late.
There were industry darlings of 1968/69 that got washed up by the early 1970s. The 1960s 7 dwarves of Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, CDC, and Honeywell and RCA and GE gave way to the 5-player BUNCH as the last 2 left the industry in 1971. Everyone else basically left over the next 15 years as they Yahoo/Sun'd their warchest in long declines.
All signs are there for the following timeline
1970?-1973? timesharing crash
1981-1982 videogame crash*
1993?-1997? unix workstation crash
1999-2001 dotcom*
2008 - general market*
2022 - crypto*
The things with *s are settled - the unix crash is mostly settled as real, but the time-sharing crash is something I've pieced together and haven't found anyone else mentioning
First-hand industry and machine documentation of the pre-micro era. I've been working on a narrative recently of what I call a time-sharing crash in the early 1970s.
I'm not sure if it existed or not. The Computerworld stock picks index, using their magazines at archive.org, don't really show a modern "crash"(example: https://archive.org/details/computerworld4265unse4/page/n37/...)
I don't know if that's much to go on simply because finance worked differently in that era and was relatively crash free in the modern sense until Reagan's deregulations and 1987's black monday.
I'm not a professional economist and the computer industry was very insular at the time but looking historically there appears to be a cluster of thematic bankruptcies, mergers, acquisitions and industry departures (such as GE getting out of computers selling its division to honeywell in 1970) that I think you can coin the idea of a "time-sharing crash" somewhere in the early 1970s.
It has all the dynamics. A new adjacent industry came out right after it (microcomputers), a migration of industrial centers (this is when boston's route 128 really started taking a backseat to silicon valley) and there were firesale style selloffs in the mid-70s of timesharing systems in the backs of magazines like computerworld from aspiring smaller firms that came in on a hype but were too late.
There were industry darlings of 1968/69 that got washed up by the early 1970s. The 1960s 7 dwarves of Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, CDC, and Honeywell and RCA and GE gave way to the 5-player BUNCH as the last 2 left the industry in 1971. Everyone else basically left over the next 15 years as they Yahoo/Sun'd their warchest in long declines.
All signs are there for the following timeline
1970?-1973? timesharing crash
1981-1982 videogame crash*
1993?-1997? unix workstation crash
1999-2001 dotcom*
2008 - general market*
2022 - crypto*
The things with *s are settled - the unix crash is mostly settled as real, but the time-sharing crash is something I've pieced together and haven't found anyone else mentioning