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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Companies go bust all the time. One of the corporations I've worked for simply disappeared (Data I/O). Corporations disappear all the time. Remember RCA? No? How about Kmart? Sears? Kodak? Tektronix? Novell? Lotus? Wordstar? AOL? Zilog? Myspace? Zenith? Curtis-Mathis? RCA was once the biggest corp in the world.

I've known people in every corporation I've worked for who accomplished nothing and were not managers. I was often given the job of trying to turn whatever they did into something useful. Everybody knew who they were. I remember one person, we'll call "Smith". "Smith" would check in code, and it was always so bad that someone else would have to redo the whole thing. After a while, the term "smith-code" became a generic term for code that was worse than nothing.

How bad can you be that your name becomes a generic term for useless work?

"Smith" eventually got laid off. The team was relieved.

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Sure, I was imprecise, I mean, they do not necessarily go bust. And even if they do, it can be delayed by decades, even centuries, by techniques that are too numerous and well known to list here.

I've known a few Smith's in my time, one thing they all had in common was the protection of a manager who had no interest in the quality of Smith's work, as long as Smith would take his side in any disputes. When the consequences became too great, the manager would suddenly understand the problem and approve the minimum of changes to fix it, while taking credit for the work. Smith would not complain about this slight because he understood the nature of the transaction.

Edit: btw. congrats getting rid of your Smith, these people can be very difficult to dislodge. Presumably your guy did not have the protection of a manager.

None of those companies have gone bust though. RCA got purchased and integrated by/into GE, Kodak filed bankruptcy but still exists with a significant number of employees, Tektronix is currently a fortune 500 company, Novell is now owned by Micro Focus, Lotus was never that big of a company, but they still exist and are doing pretty poor but still sell cars, AOL still exists and is owned by Yahoo, MySpace still exists and is owned by an advertising company and the other 2 or 3 I've never heard of.

The Lotus that the GP refers to is probably Lotus Development Corporation / Lotus Software, the makers of the hugely popular Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet from the 80s. It's still around-ish: it was owned by IBM until 2017 then was sold to the Indian company HCL Technologies for $1.8 billion. Pretty good for a company thought to be two decades obsolete!

Zilog was the maker of the Z80 microprocessor that powered a huge number of games consoles and simple computers in the 80s. Also still around - its parent company was acquired for $750 million.

I had to look up Curtis-Mathis because it wasn't a thing in the UK.

And MicroPro / WordStar International does seem to be legitimately dead: acquired by SoftKey who were acquired by Mattel who have since gotten rid of all the associated brands.

Who uses Lotus 1-2-3 today? Nobody.

Yeah, I know they didn't literally go bust, some company always winds up buying the remaining value in the company, as its trademarks and IP have value.

But in any practical sense, they ceased to exist. (I meant Lotus of 1-2-3 fame, not car fame.)

Tektronix didn't go bust. It was acquired for $2.8b in 2007 with 4,000 employees and is now part of an umbrella corporation that trades as NYSE:FTV.

Their scopes are still for sale and still good.

You're right, I thought I'd remembered they'd gone bust.

> part of an umbrella corporation

meaning their former glory is gone. When I was starting out Tektronix was a very big deal in computers and electronics. I haven't even heard their name in 20-30 years.

You're right too. Their former glory is gone, I never knew how much bigger they were before until I looked up more of their history today.

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