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When I was at uni in NZ (mid 70s) me and my friends wrote a compiler for 6800s (an algol subset, it fit in 2k), we wrote it with copyrights for "uSoft" (that's a greek mu), in retrospect it was an obvious name at the time.

Later we discovered some other guys using the same name in the US (also with a mu) they had a basic interpreter, how lame! (we had a compiler) however we really didn't understand the advantages of being born in the right place .....

I really wish we'd incorporated, we could have sold the name for some silly amount of money

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jll29 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not just "incorporated", you would also have to have ported it to various computers that were sold (as MSFT did - and that Bill Gates' parents were lawyers with IBM contacts helped a lot).

NZ is a fantastic country, but is relatively remote from larger markets, and its own population isn't large enough for the economics of scale to apply only locally. So even if you had tried, you may have failed. As you rightly say, power of location. On the other hand, now, due to globalization, things are possible there, too - for example, the app market is not limited geographically.

BTW, you should consider uploading your old compiler's code on GitHub if you still have it; there is increased interest in "software archeology" now, given that so many emulators have been built.

	▲	Taniwha 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I was more talking about owning the name in NZ (and maybe Oz) The software source was on cards (developed on a simulator on a uni mainframe, much like Microsoft were developing their code), sadly the cards were left behind when I moved to the US a decade later

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ErigmolCt 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's such a great story and such a classic case of being just ahead of the curve but in the wrong corner of the world.

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Rodeoclash 16 hours ago | parent [-]

I worked in a digital technology company in Wellington in the 90s and one of our key technologies that we sold was a hosted form on a secure (remember, this is the era that https was not common) website to collect credit card payments. We were a proto Stripe in the year 1999 but totally in the wrong place in the world to take advantage of it.

	▲	ska 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		May have been the wrong time too. 1999 was chock full of companies that failed to get traction and died during the dot-com collapse, but variants became much more successful 20 years later. Much of this was mostly waiting in infrastructure I suspect.