Simon Says – Musings of a Technology CTO

Image C/O Gigaom

With so many competing IOT hubs and ecosystems – how can the dream of the connected home, digital butler experience be realized?

Can you remember personal computing in the 80’s? I was a Commodore 64 kid, I thought it was the best computer ever – why would anyone use anything else?

My classmates generally disagreed though – there was the ZX Spectrum, Tandy, Acorn, Atari, Amiga, BBC Micro (A and B), Amstrad, Apple, and the one kid who’s father had a CPM 80286.

The challenge was, even though we all had much the same goal – play the best games, learn how computers work, maybe write a game of our own – everything was completely different and incompatible – even storage with tape, microdrive, 3″, 3.5″ 5″, 8″ disks – each manufacturer, assured in their own superiority forged ahead creating their own proprietary isolated world. Read more…