At one time, Digital Equipment Corporation (aka DEC) was the top seller of computer equipment to colleges and universities in the USA. Who?
IBM people famously never said the word DEC. Whenever DEC computers--the darlings of students and professors--were mentioned, IBM people said "Who?" IBM basically couldn't sell computers to academic people at universities. Often it seemed they weren't even interested. They would only sell much more expensive computers to college administrators. They knew where the money was.
The general uneducated public had never heard of DEC computers either, but everybody knew the name IBM (though, few knew then that IBM had assisted the Holocaust.) So the rhetorical question "who" often had a lot of traction.
Now mostly remembered for the PDP-11 series of minicomputers especially in the ultimate VAX-11 form, at one time DEC was mostly known for the PDP-10, which is the computer the Internet was born on in the late 1960's and early 1970's.
DEC machines were also the very ones upon which Unix was invented. The ideas of Unix have become the core of computing today, with many spinoffs including Linux and MacOS.
I started using a PDP-10 with the original "Decsystem 10" at my college in 1973. I remember it very fondly. Unlike "Ask Mr Protocol," I never got to play with Tenex, which came out later, or Unix until much later.
Sometime in the late 1970's, however, DEC made a startling announcement. The long anticipated update to the aging PDP-10 processor, code named "Jupiter," had been cancelled. Henceforth DEC would put all its resources into the development of the new PDP-11 VAX, which was not at all compatible with PDP-10.
Major universities across the country were outraged. Stanford, in particular, snorted "We have more than $1B invested in PDP-10 related equipment!" Stanford's wrath is of particular importance, because Stanford decided henceforth not to rely on self-interested and self-important computer companies and make their own computer system instead. This was how the Stanford University Network came into being, and by the 1980's S.U.N. was spun off and became SUN Microsystems, the company which in less than 10 years ate DEC's lunch in education and research and ruled that arena for 25 years--while inventing technologies central to distributed computing and the Web--but ultimately becoming the victim of it's own arrogance.
[It also happens to be true that the VAX computers were slow as heck, and incapable of handling more than a few users running larger applications of the day, 1 mips with perhpas 1 meg hardmemory, possibly gigabytes online on "fast" busses. Not until the mid 80's, with the 8600 series of Vaxes, did DEC have anything decent all all, that was only 4.4 mips. Where I worked you could make a cup of coffee while the 11/780 was processing your password. And VMS didn't buffer more than one line at once, which made the slowness especially intolerable. People told me that Unix on an 11/780 was much nicer.
Curiously, the PDP-10 always seemed reasonably fast. It didn't get bogged down in paging as much.
And so, in 2018, in yet another fit of anti-user modernist arrogance by a technology company, SONOS has summarily dropped support for its original dedicated controller, the CR100. Now SONOS does not have a dedicated controller anymore, you must use a 3rd party computer, tablet, or smart phone to control a SONOS system.
Hundreds of users (probably representing a universe 100 to 1000 times larger) have been sufficiently outraged to post to a SONOS Community Forum.
Although "warnings" were given before the CR100 disabling system "updates" in January, by April or so the warnings were taken down, according to some reports. I don't remember seeing any warnings when I did the fatal update in August, but at that particular time both my CR100's were discharged because I was reorganizing my bedroom audio systems. Mostly I do use the Mac interface to SONOS, but I find it handy to pause or adjust the audio level from the bedroom controller. Fortunately I still have some control from the Sonos boxes themselves.
*****
When the SONOS system was introduced in 2004, the CR100 was an industry leading remote control: wireless, with picture display, a scrolling touchwheel for scrolling through lists of titles and songs. In fact, the CR100 was a fully complete system controller as well. It had a nice drop in charger.
Only 5 years later did I actually get a smartphone. Certainly the smartphone has a higher resolution screen...which is actually a real touchscreen.
However, even today, touchscreen controls require more attention. They don't always work as you intended. The dedicated contact sensitive buttons of the CR100 can even be felt because they are indented from the top panel.
Worse, using a your own smartphone as a Sonos controller is a pain in the neck for many reasons.
1) Your smartphone may not necessarily be at hand as you settle down to listen, or reach over to pause the sound before going to sleep.
I find this is especially true for me because I use my smartphone as an audio analyzer, etc, and often leave it where I was blogging about that instead of carrying it with me to the listening spot. With the CR100, I just kept it at the listening spot, or, more importantly, at the bedside--the place it's unbeatable for.
2)You have to log in to the smartphone. I find the finger sensor on my iPhone only works half of the time or less on the first press, and just over half the time after several presses. So, something a little less than half of the time, I have to punch in 4 digits, which is a two hand operation, and it's easiest if the phone is straight in front of you. (File this under more smart phone annoyances as far as I'm concerned. I'd consider turning off "security" altogether, but then the bottom button can't turn the phone on, and you have to reach for the less handy side button to turn the phone on.)
3) You have to navigate to the Sonos app. At least the iPhone has only 1 tier of icons to navigate through. On the Samsung Android phone I had, you'd first have to navigate to the correct tier of tiers.
4) You have to open the app, and it might first ask, or even insist, that you upgrade the app first. That could, of course, take the whole afternoon, as you find yourself needing to upgrade your entire system. You can't simply upgrade the phone app to the app of the rest of your system, you need to upgrade EVERYTHING to the latest version, because you can't select which app version, and an app upgrade may be required by your smartphone version, not the version of the rest of your Sonos system.
And here, all you wanted to do was pause the music in the bedroom just before falling asleep.
With the CR100, you simply press the pause button.
IBM people famously never said the word DEC. Whenever DEC computers--the darlings of students and professors--were mentioned, IBM people said "Who?" IBM basically couldn't sell computers to academic people at universities. Often it seemed they weren't even interested. They would only sell much more expensive computers to college administrators. They knew where the money was.
The general uneducated public had never heard of DEC computers either, but everybody knew the name IBM (though, few knew then that IBM had assisted the Holocaust.) So the rhetorical question "who" often had a lot of traction.
Now mostly remembered for the PDP-11 series of minicomputers especially in the ultimate VAX-11 form, at one time DEC was mostly known for the PDP-10, which is the computer the Internet was born on in the late 1960's and early 1970's.
DEC machines were also the very ones upon which Unix was invented. The ideas of Unix have become the core of computing today, with many spinoffs including Linux and MacOS.
I started using a PDP-10 with the original "Decsystem 10" at my college in 1973. I remember it very fondly. Unlike "Ask Mr Protocol," I never got to play with Tenex, which came out later, or Unix until much later.
Sometime in the late 1970's, however, DEC made a startling announcement. The long anticipated update to the aging PDP-10 processor, code named "Jupiter," had been cancelled. Henceforth DEC would put all its resources into the development of the new PDP-11 VAX, which was not at all compatible with PDP-10.
Major universities across the country were outraged. Stanford, in particular, snorted "We have more than $1B invested in PDP-10 related equipment!" Stanford's wrath is of particular importance, because Stanford decided henceforth not to rely on self-interested and self-important computer companies and make their own computer system instead. This was how the Stanford University Network came into being, and by the 1980's S.U.N. was spun off and became SUN Microsystems, the company which in less than 10 years ate DEC's lunch in education and research and ruled that arena for 25 years--while inventing technologies central to distributed computing and the Web--but ultimately becoming the victim of it's own arrogance.
[It also happens to be true that the VAX computers were slow as heck, and incapable of handling more than a few users running larger applications of the day, 1 mips with perhpas 1 meg hardmemory, possibly gigabytes online on "fast" busses. Not until the mid 80's, with the 8600 series of Vaxes, did DEC have anything decent all all, that was only 4.4 mips. Where I worked you could make a cup of coffee while the 11/780 was processing your password. And VMS didn't buffer more than one line at once, which made the slowness especially intolerable. People told me that Unix on an 11/780 was much nicer.
Curiously, the PDP-10 always seemed reasonably fast. It didn't get bogged down in paging as much.
And so, in 2018, in yet another fit of anti-user modernist arrogance by a technology company, SONOS has summarily dropped support for its original dedicated controller, the CR100. Now SONOS does not have a dedicated controller anymore, you must use a 3rd party computer, tablet, or smart phone to control a SONOS system.
Hundreds of users (probably representing a universe 100 to 1000 times larger) have been sufficiently outraged to post to a SONOS Community Forum.
Although "warnings" were given before the CR100 disabling system "updates" in January, by April or so the warnings were taken down, according to some reports. I don't remember seeing any warnings when I did the fatal update in August, but at that particular time both my CR100's were discharged because I was reorganizing my bedroom audio systems. Mostly I do use the Mac interface to SONOS, but I find it handy to pause or adjust the audio level from the bedroom controller. Fortunately I still have some control from the Sonos boxes themselves.
*****
When the SONOS system was introduced in 2004, the CR100 was an industry leading remote control: wireless, with picture display, a scrolling touchwheel for scrolling through lists of titles and songs. In fact, the CR100 was a fully complete system controller as well. It had a nice drop in charger.
Only 5 years later did I actually get a smartphone. Certainly the smartphone has a higher resolution screen...which is actually a real touchscreen.
However, even today, touchscreen controls require more attention. They don't always work as you intended. The dedicated contact sensitive buttons of the CR100 can even be felt because they are indented from the top panel.
Worse, using a your own smartphone as a Sonos controller is a pain in the neck for many reasons.
1) Your smartphone may not necessarily be at hand as you settle down to listen, or reach over to pause the sound before going to sleep.
I find this is especially true for me because I use my smartphone as an audio analyzer, etc, and often leave it where I was blogging about that instead of carrying it with me to the listening spot. With the CR100, I just kept it at the listening spot, or, more importantly, at the bedside--the place it's unbeatable for.
2)You have to log in to the smartphone. I find the finger sensor on my iPhone only works half of the time or less on the first press, and just over half the time after several presses. So, something a little less than half of the time, I have to punch in 4 digits, which is a two hand operation, and it's easiest if the phone is straight in front of you. (File this under more smart phone annoyances as far as I'm concerned. I'd consider turning off "security" altogether, but then the bottom button can't turn the phone on, and you have to reach for the less handy side button to turn the phone on.)
3) You have to navigate to the Sonos app. At least the iPhone has only 1 tier of icons to navigate through. On the Samsung Android phone I had, you'd first have to navigate to the correct tier of tiers.
4) You have to open the app, and it might first ask, or even insist, that you upgrade the app first. That could, of course, take the whole afternoon, as you find yourself needing to upgrade your entire system. You can't simply upgrade the phone app to the app of the rest of your system, you need to upgrade EVERYTHING to the latest version, because you can't select which app version, and an app upgrade may be required by your smartphone version, not the version of the rest of your Sonos system.
And here, all you wanted to do was pause the music in the bedroom just before falling asleep.
With the CR100, you simply press the pause button.
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