Fortune Systems (Brands you never hear much about)

[Chuck Guzis]

On 11/12/2005 at 12:34 PM nospam212-cctalk at yahoo.com wrote:

>I have a couple of Fortune systems and some doc but
>they're incomplete so I have done much with them yet. 
>If I ever find enough stuff to get them working I
>will.  We looked at Fortune years ago when my dad's
>company was looking for a multi-user system for the
>office.  Kind of liked it at the time but the picked
>an Altos instead as the company seemed a bit more
>stable.

The company was hyped quite a bit with a healthy (for those days) dose of
startup capital; my impression of the firm from my position as a contractor
was that an awful lot of money was wasted just fooling around with things
not directly related to product development.  I believe that their entry
system target price was $5000, not bad in those days.

But the PC, although not a Unix box, was sufficient to do it in.

One very rare item from this company would be their color graphics
terminal.  I've only seen a prototype, but someone told me that it had
actually made it into production.

IIRC, Bill Joy was on contract to FS during most of the firm's existence.

Cheers,
Chuck