Why did the 1982-era MCZ 2/60 desktop computer have an Exxon logo on it?

The early 1980s were the heyday of management consultants peddling wild diversification strategies to stodgy companies. Other examples: - Owens-Illinois (glass bottles; no growth) was told to buy nursing homes (people get older; lots of growth). It did so, only to bail out years later - Kao (Japanese detergent maker) tried expanding into floppy discs. Didn't work out.

All these moves were based on a child-like belief that getting any aging company and its management into a growing business was more important than having the culture, talent, processes, etc. to work well in that industry. Call it a stock-picker's mentality.

This context helps explain why stock buybacks have become such a big thing now. When companies have more cash flow than they can profitably use in their core business, they no longer are as eager to diversify into fast-growth, cash-hungry businesses that need funding. BigCo managers now know their limits.

So they give the money back to shareholders instead. And investors can insta-swap into supposedly "better" industries, where fully formed management teams and business processes are ready to roll.

We can argue about whether multi-billion-dollar buybacks are a good thing for society or not. But we got here for a reason.

Ha. My dad was VP engineering at Vydec for a while. I worked there for a summer, and used the Vydec to write a Pascal course (which I taught there). It had a great vector display, nice keyboard. It had 8” floppy disks. I think they were selling for $10k. I remember seeing my first sealed 20Mb “Winchester” hard drive there, which would be incorporated soon. Nicely designed, advanced word processors for their time. Dad told me about the time he met with Francis Ford Coppola who wanted to buy a bunch for Apocalypse Now. Exxon Information Systems bought them around then, and there was a management bloodbath. My dad initially got more responsibility as his bosses got the axe, but he saw the writing on the wall and left for DEC. Wang soon destroyed them in the market.

Some detail on the time period when Exxon owned Zilog: https://mondaynote.com/50-years-intech-part-4-the-exxon-delu...

It's important to point out that Exxon was the original investor of Zilog from the beginning, giving Zilog the fund needed to start the company. This includes building Zilog's own semiconductor fab to manufacture the chip, costed several millions of dollars, which was the standard practice in the 1970s - fabless wasn't really a thing until the early 90s. "Oil money", a hot topic debated today, was the norm.

> Federico Faggin (who designed the Intel 8080, founded Zilog and designed the Z80) said: When I joined -- when Zilog was formed -- by the way, Ralph and his wife set up the original office in State Street in downtown Los Altos, so I already had an office and a desk when I arrived at Zilog. Of course, Zilog in those days was not called Zilog yet. And then we had an interview with a reporter from the Electronic News, which was a weekly newspaper in the electronics field, was very well-known. And this reporter reported that there was this company that had been formed with Faggin, Ungermann, and they were going to be some kind of microprocessor company. And that caught the eye of Exxon Enterprises. Exxon Enterprises in those days was a subsidiary of Exxon Corporation, the oil company. And they were making venture capital investments in the R&D information technology. So somebody called me up from Exxon and wanted to visit.

> [...] Yeah, it isn’t that I didn’t intend to build a fab. I didn’t believe that we could possibly get the money to build the fab. You know, even if in those days fabs were not very expensive, it would still take several million dollars for the equipment, whereas now, of course, it’s several billion. But in those days with the three-four million of equipment, you can actually build a small fab. So I didn’t think we could get the money. But then after the success of the Z80, Ralph and I were able to convince Exxon Enterprises to actually fund a fab. Also it was absolutely essential if we had a second sourcing arrangement with Mostek as we did, that we were independent in manufacturing in order to survive as a company. So it was an imperative to have a fab at that point.

The interview by Computer History Museum is extremely interesting (as always) and worth reading.

* Zilog Oral History Panel on the Founding of the Company and the Development of the Z80 Microprocessor

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...

That also looks like a rebranded DEC VT-100 terminal.