Hermann Hauser, founder and CEO of Acorn Computers, then founder and CEO of VC company Amadeus, and the backer of numerous successful start-ups from ARM, to Virata to Element 14 to Plastic Logic and Icera, tells an amusing tale about one of his less successful ventures.
Hauser's next computer start-up after Acorn was the Active Book Company, making a pen-based computer called EO, which was a joint venture with AT&T and Kleiner Perkins. It was a rival to the Apple Newton. But pen computing didn't take off.
"The launch of the EO in Las Vegas was a big launch by AT&T", recalls Hauser, "the EO had a built-in cell-phone -as opposed to the Newton - it was the first true communicator. We called it the EO Communicator."
"So everyone was interested to see a demonstration. So someone in the audience, with an EO, was going to ring up and send a message to the EO on stage. This was in the early days of cellular telephony and some calls didn't go through."
"And since we had the world's press there and TV cameras, we went to the AT&T guy and said we've really got to make this work."
"'OK boys', the AT&T guy said, 'we'll shut down Las Vegas for half an hour'. And he did."
"He shut down the Las Vegas cell phone system and made it possible to only ring one number - and that was the number of this thing on the stage. So we knew this call would go through! Only AT&T could do that."
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