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WE OLD, RETIRED computer people still get together from time to time. Usually over pizza and beer. We rehash the old days. Old war stories with a few exaggerations, perhaps, bounce back and forth. We range over all the events that we were part of, the events that built the computer industry of today.

The transition from vacuum tubes to transistors was the first breakthrough, and we all knew it. FORTRAN was designed to persuade the slide rule set to give computers a try. We saw that as the start of the user community. When the IBM mainframes dominated, the pace increased. We were there when computers became mainstream. When integrated circuits came along we knew that the floodgates had opened. Intel's first 4004 chip showed us what was certain to come. The spreadsheet was a complete innovation. It brought a capability to the desktop that had never been possible. The laser printer generated the first computer printout acceptable for office work.

We knew immediately where that was going. We missed the Internet, but hell, so did everyone else. But no matter what we ever drag out, we always end up at the same place with the same old question. We were there. We could see all that. We knew all that. So, how come we ain't rich now?

Of course, that's the way it has always been. When Marco Polo's crew was discovering the wonders of the Orient, they weren't the ones who got rich. It was the merchants back home who sold the spices and silks. And so it is again today. It's the modern day rug merchants getting rich on the computer marvels crafted by us, the cyberadventurers.

And now we have a technical explanation for it all. From a professor at Harvard Business School, of all places, Clayton Christensen has made it all make sense. His book, The Innovator's Dilemma, talks about sustaining and disruptive technologies. His definition of sustaining technologies is the incremental improvements and variations on the established way of doing something. It is what successful companies do. They listen to their customers and improve their products to help those customers improve the customer's business. There is the satisfaction of the master craftsman working a thing of beauty. There is also the monetary reward that comes from providing customers with what they want.

Disruptive technologies, on the other hand, are not beautiful butterflies rising to the sun, but are ugly grubs squirming out of a mudpack. Disruptive technologies have zero customer demand, because customers can't demand something they don't know anything about. They also can't use something they don't know what to do with. Disruptive technologies start out inefficient, expensive, and error riddled because, by definition, they are new. Established companies cannot justify allocating time and resources to something they have no projection for. It's the maverick, start-up organizations that build on the disruptive technologies because they cannot compete with the big, established players who have already built their organizations and are sustaining its technology.

Thus has it been. DEC and Data General minicomputers supplanted the IBM mainframes. The Dell and Gateway PCs pushed out the minicomputers. And now the Palm Pilot devices are on their way to succeeding the PCs. In all of these cases, the previous King of the Hill did nothing wrong but lost anyway.

In all of these cases, however, we castigate the losers as being stupid and refusing to smell the coffee. The reality is that they were none of that. They were tending to their own business, which is what they were supposed to be doing. Let's picture it. An IBM executive staff meeting in the early 80s. The mainframes are dominant, and customers are just beginning to utilize their full power. The juggernaut in full momentum. Success in every measure. Then a 20s something, A Bill Gates type stands up and tells the managers that soon there will be a computer on every desk, that the end was coming. The managers might listen, but they would be functionally unable to divert resources, time, and company direction away from what was working, and showed no sign whatsoever of slowing down.

Now let us consider the winners in the cases above. We anoint them as brilliant and seers. In all of those cases they were probably no more talented than their competition, but they were the ones who were in the right place at the right time and the decisions they made turned out to be mainstream. Chaos theory in action.

And, of course, there were others. The most exciting development of the 60s was Burroughs' mainframes built on stack architecture. It generated a cult following similar to that of MAC or Linux today. Of the early 8-bit microprocessors, the Motorola 68XX chips were much better than the Intel 80XX. Everybody except IBM preferred them, but only Apple survived. Symbolics Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., arguably had the most dazzling technical brilliance in the computer industry in the early 1980s. It made computers specifically structured for artificial intelligence. And so on

So what were we doing when the disruptive technologies bubbled up? We as individuals were doing exactly what the established companies were doing. Doing our thing, at the time, to the maximum of our ability and opportunity.

So now we are at the moment of evaluation. Should we have been the time-immemorial rug merchant or the adventurer at the edge of the earth? Being a male rug merchant we could have indulged in the trophy wife who would have escalated us to levels unimagined. Being a female rug merchant would have bought Toy Boys galore providing a sense of transfiguration ecstatic in its artificiality. Or should we have grabbed a comet of disruption and hung on to crescendo or crash?
No, our destiny was to ride the cutting edge, and the cutting edge applies only to sustaining technologies. It is where the action is. We rode the dominant technology of its time to accomplishments that will characterize human existence as long as it is on our planet.

The triumphs of our time were accomplished on the full blossom of proven technology. Our participation and contribution, as small as they may have been, are what we will always have with us. We did the right thing, no regrets.