Why did ShuffleMaster create RapidRoulette?

In DiscFlicker's thread A Foot In The Door..., he makes this comment:

Quote: discflicker

ShuffleMaster comes out with RapidRoulette but uses a PROPRIATARY protocol. So no 3rd party company who specializes in, say, HANDICAPPED ACCESS can just invent a player unit that will "snap - in" to ShuffleMaster's server protocol. No, they need to ask if it OK, and let ShuffleMaster make all the calls and money.

That statement makes me want to ask DiscFlicker a very specific question:

Why did ShuffleMaster create RapidRoulette?

Note: Although directed to DiscFlicker, I invite everyone to answer.

---

Here's my own answer:

The goal of any company is to make money using any legal means to do so.

DiscFlicker seems upset that ShuffleMaster used propriatary protocol when creating RapidRoulette. I say it would have been stupid of them to do otherwise.

Shufflemaste had nothing to do with the creation of RapidRoulette. They aquired it when the purchased the Australian company StarGames. However that has nothing to do with your question to discflicker.

For the money, DJ, assuming they wrote it, or whatever.

Digital Equipment Corporation wrote some of the first computer operating systems (RSTS, RT-11, RSX-11, my favorite.. VMS) and the first LAYERED communications protocol (DECnet, over EtherNet hardware). All propriotary. Ken Olson and his software guru Dave Cutler (GOD) made lots of money.

But then the OSF came along, and OPENED IT ALL UP with... you guessed it, ... STANDARDS.

And DEC sank like a rock in the ocean.

Look it up.

This is an identicle situation. I am the OSF of gaming. At least, that's what I would like to be.

OSF... Oregon Shakespeare Festival? Old Spaghetti Factory? Office of State Finance? Organization of Special needs Families?

(I looked it up.)

The wiki on OSF says that it was actually first proposed by Armando Stettner of DEC, and "The foundation's original sponsoring members were Apollo Computer, Groupe Bull, Digital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Nixdorf Computer, and Siemens AG, sometimes called the "Gang of Seven"." Later in the entry, it is detailed how DEC used the complete OSF/1 as "Digital Unix" and everyone else "licensed the operating system to include various components of OSF/1 in their own products." I found this interesting: "Parts of OSF/1 are contained in virtually all versions of UNIX systems making it arguably the most widely deployed UNIX product ever produced. The OSF/1 copyright appears in the list of technologies used in the iPhone." WOW. That speaks right to the heart of it; a 20 year old OS that is still compact, portable, and viable. Amazing that it isn't recognized for what it is.

What I found interesting from all of this is that DEC was instrumental in providing the seed of its own decline.

Quote: thlf

Shufflemaste had nothing to do with the creation of RapidRoulette. They aquired it when the purchased the Australian company StarGames. However that has nothing to do with your question to discflicker.

Thanks. I didn't know that.
But, you're right. It doesn't change the point of the question, nor my own answer. On the contrary, it kinda confirms it.

StarGames created it to make money. I'm sure SuffleMaster paid them a pretty penny when they bought it. And now ShuffleMaster is making money licensing it to casinos.

Quote: Mosca

What I found interesting from all of this is that DEC was instrumental in providing the seed of its own decline.

Yeah.

And DiscFlicker is upset that ShuffleMaster won't use an open technology to allow competition to gain access to their proprietary product.

Go figure.

Not to stray from the thred, but FYI, after DEC, Dave Cutler joined Microsoft and created the Windows-NT operating system and all of its decendents; 2000, XP, Vista, 7, and then he wrote their cloud OS in use today.

A quote from Dave: "Windows-NT = VMS + 1? What took you so long?"

This was refering to the rumor that the abbreviation WNT being VMS plus one letter was more than just coincendetal.

He knew it all along, of course. But think about the smirk that musta been on his face when he proposed the name of the new operating system upon which Microsoft's entire future depened to Bill Gates.

Bill says "Hey... Windows-NT... sounds really cool... umm, what does the NT stand for?"

Dave pauses for a minute... "Windows New Technology!"

Bill: "Wow... COOL"

Just FYI. I love telling that story.


My Hero !!!

I know we're going down a path away from the original question. But I have spent the last half hour reading about DEC and their fall from prominence (once the second largest computer corp in the world, and second largest employer in Massachusetts, after the state government).

I think that calling the rise of OSF the fall of DEC is stretching it. I think the company just didn't have the vision to see that the big future was in personal computing:

"Ken Olsen famously derided [microcomputers] in 1977, stating 'There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.'"

"Although many of these products were well designed, most of them were DEC-only or DEC-centric, and customers frequently ignored them and used third-party products instead. This problem was further exacerbated by Olsen's aversion to traditional advertising and his belief that well-engineered products would sell themselves. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on these projects, at the same time that workstations using RISC microprocessors were starting to approach VAX CPUs in performance. As microprocessors continued to improve in the 1980s, it soon became clear that the next generation would offer performance and features equal to the best of DECs low-end minicomputer lineup. Worse, the Berkeley RISC and Stanford MIPS designs were aiming to introduce 32-bit designs that would outperform the fastest members of the VAX family, DEC's cash cow. Constrained by the huge success of their VAX/VMS products, which followed the proprietary model, the company was very late to respond to these threats."

So, OSF was part of it, but the real issue was why DEC turned its back on OSF, because they certainly had the resources to use OSF to their advantage. The company followed the lead of Ken Olsen, who had steered them to great heights, right into the ditch.

Quote: Mosca

So, OSF was part of it, but the real issue was why DEC turned its back on OSF, because they certainly had the resources to use OSF to their advantage. The company followed the lead of Ken Olsen, who had steered them to great heights, right into the ditch.

The marketplace doesn't care about whether a platform is open or proprietary. Empirical evidence: both DEC and Apple are closed platforms. DEC failed, but I don't think anyone is going to argue that the iPhone/iPad platform isn't a smash hit. If anything, this example illustrates that business-oriented devices may have a greater need for openness than consumer-oriented devices. Except gaming machines are consumer-oriented devices...

Apple makes millions on controlling access to content via the App Store. If anything, I'd think the right strategy seems to be develop the killer platform and monetize access to it. That's not standardization, that's a monopoly. Just like IGT had with the Telnaes patent, and look where they ended up...

Quote: MathExtremist

Quote: Mosca

So, OSF was part of it, but the real issue was why DEC turned its back on OSF, because they certainly had the resources to use OSF to their advantage. The company followed the lead of Ken Olsen, who had steered them to great heights, right into the ditch.

The marketplace doesn't care about whether a platform is open or proprietary. Empirical evidence: both DEC and Apple are closed platforms. DEC failed, but I don't think anyone is going to argue that the iPhone/iPad platform isn't a smash hit. If anything, this example illustrates that business-oriented devices may have a greater need for openness than consumer-oriented devices. Except gaming machines are consumer-oriented devices...

Apple makes millions on controlling access to content via the App Store. If anything, I'd think the right strategy seems to be develop the killer platform and monetize access to it. That's not standardization, that's a monopoly. Just like IGT had with the Telnaes patent, and look where they ended up...

I'm just musing on all this, ME. I do think it's possible that Apple's proprietariness is catching up to it, though. Android is just blowing up everything. Once the lid is off, there's no putting it back on.

I got nothing that says I'm right on that, it's just a feeling. Having used both machines, Apple and Windows/ iPhone and Android, I don't think there's enough difference between the experiences to say one is better than the other... so I think that in the long run the victor will be the more open platform. But I'm just another idiot with a keyboard, so take it for what its worth.

Quote: MathExtremist

The marketplace doesn't care about whether a platform is open or proprietary. Empirical evidence: both DEC and Apple are closed platforms. DEC failed, but I don't think anyone is going to argue that the iPhone/iPad platform isn't a smash hit.

Well, it's a very different market. It's normal for phones to be fully closed, as until recently they were seen as just that, phones, with a few gizmos to differentiate newer ones from older ones.
Android is pretty much the sole exception, and it's a much newer player on the market, without the marketing power of Steve Jobs to push it forward. For geeks, Android is the hands down winner, followed by jailbroken iphones, but most users have little intention of bothering with extra non-game apps or advanced features on their phones.

The reason it seemed like DEC caused our own demise was because we knew open standards were coming, just like the other companies involved. First we tried to re-name our Unix product to "ZENIX" to show "openness". Then we got involved with POSIX and the OSF just to show everyone that we were on the same bandwagon (we assumed it would fail to dent our installed base because we were both a hardware AND software company).

But then the darn thing worked, and proved to all the IT managers who decided what platforms to run under that they didn’t need DEC's hardware OR software. Then we tried running Windows-NT on OUR hardware, (which, BTW, was always way ahead of it time), but by then it was too late... Compaq started producing workstations at fractional costs, Sun workstations were really catching on, Microsoft dug in deep with OPEN os's that run on multi-vendor hardware, and then it all just fell apart for DEC.

We tried to cling onto anything we could, but our demise was expected, and so we started selling everything and eventually the company itself got sold to Compaq (a real slap in the face... we were # 2 behind only IBM for the longest time, and finally sold to a PC company. YUCK!)

But that is part of the lifecycle of a great new innovation. These weren't really patent issues, it was more of a first-to-market thing. We were the first in the small computer market... we created the first “MINI” computers. We had it by the nuts… IBM and Zerox, and Burroughs took the big mainframe market, and we had ALL the rest.

We created the first “MICRO” to make our stuff go faster. But way back then, who knew that just one these little boxes could be as powerful as a roomful of PDP-11/34s, and replace it all at 1/1000th the cost? Nobody. Not even Dave Cutler himself!

The final slap in my face as a DEC Senior Software Specialist was when they renamed our flagship OS from VMS to openVMS. I bet ol’ Dave Cutler blew a major gasket when he heard that!

Quote: DJTeddyBear

Yeah.

And DiscFlicker is upset that ShuffleMaster won't use an open technology to allow competition to gain access to their proprietary product.

Go figure.

Who is upset? Let Goliath fall where he stands... he has no support whatsoever; Everybody and his brother have already copied the technology. Have you ever been to G2e? The hall is LOADED with ‘em.

It is now time for evolution to take root by having someone stand up and volunteer their specific implementation for use as a public domain architecture upon which MULTIPLE vendors, such as yourself, DJ, can freely compete and contribute.


FOR EXAMPLE, a simple USB port that any device can plug into and execute the functions of the player program, and provide interfaces for normal people and handicapped alike.

It only needs ONE THING. Guess what it is, DJ. Guess.

Quote: P90

Well, it's a very different market. It's normal for phones to be fully closed, as until recently they were seen as just that, phones, with a few gizmos to differentiate newer ones from older ones.
Android is pretty much the sole exception, and it's a much newer player on the market, without the marketing power of Steve Jobs to push it forward. For geeks, Android is the hands down winner, followed by jailbroken iphones, but most users have little intention of bothering with extra non-game apps or advanced features on their phones.

That's just it -- nobody gets to jailbreak a slot machine. If you try, you'll have to jailbreak yourself shortly thereafter. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

There is a growing segment of the gaming industry that is focused on developing 3rd party content for major gaming machine manufacturers. This has less to do with standardization and more to do with the fact that content production doesn't scale except linearly. So you end up with GC2 Gaming doing Wolf Run, and then IGT releasing it on their platform (look at the slot glass next time you see the game). Then IGT comes out with another Wolf-themed game because they can, etc. No standards, just market-driven need for more content.

That need isn't there, to nearly the same extent, in the table game side. New content is much harder to develop, because there are no fancy graphics and sounds -- it's all gameplay methods. What you do see are things like linked progressives -- but there, the market contra-indicates a shared open standard because each vendor wants to control the link, and therefore the profits. Just like IGT controls the MegaBucks jackpot link. You can't just hook up a WMS or Bally machine to that system and expect to play. It's proprietary and vendor-controlled. The players don't care. They care about the entertainment value of a game, not the technical internals. If you put the same game on two different platforms, nobody will care much about which cabinet they're playing. If you put two different games on the same platform, the better game will win hands down. It's about content, because content is entertainment, and this is an entertainment industry. Not a technology industry. In gaming, intelligent adoption of technology is simply the means to the end.

Quote: Mosca

... WOW. That speaks right to the heart of it; a 20 year old OS that is still compact, portable, and viable. Amazing that it isn't recognized for what it is.

OSF is an extremely complex concept to understand or explain. (Maybe thats why I'm having trouble explaining my plans to DJ, thecesspit and MathEx, but they get it now, after a boatload of long long posts.)

As such it's really difficult to find any value in it. Indeed, there IS NO Value in it for its developers... by definition, any products they created are all FREE OF CHARGE. (This is something that MathEx has gleaned from my business plan explanations as well. He is very wise.)

OSF was a DEFINATE loss for the companies like DEC who invented the stuff and rode the donkey as far as she could go, and a boon for all the scavangers it left in its wake.


But hey, guess what... DEC is still alive... well, sort of. There are still THOUSANDS of systems running VMS to control factories, nuclear power plants and stock exchange markets. Look it up. I personally had a system running for 14 YEARS UN-INTERRUPTED on VAX hardware; Jeff Karr, a Ford Rough Office Building computer systems manager told me recedtly he thought it was a world record. I DO NOT LIE EVER... ask Jeff... JKARR11@FORD.COM.

The protocols (if you want to call them that) the OS requires from the running programs trancend hardware and even the OS itself... VMS can be run as a SIMULATOR program... so like I said in another post, the protocol is "eternal", and THIS explains why most of the OSF is still around after 20 years, alive and kicking, just like my software is still running in over 200 plants as we speak over the past 20 years.

Pretty cool, eh?

Quote: Mosca

Quote: MathExtremist

Quote: Mosca

So, OSF was part of it, but the real issue was why DEC turned its back on OSF, because they certainly had the resources to use OSF to their advantage. The company followed the lead of Ken Olsen, who had steered them to great heights, right into the ditch.

The marketplace doesn't care about whether a platform is open or proprietary. Empirical evidence: both DEC and Apple are closed platforms. DEC failed, but I don't think anyone is going to argue that the iPhone/iPad platform isn't a smash hit. If anything, this example illustrates that business-oriented devices may have a greater need for openness than consumer-oriented devices. Except gaming machines are consumer-oriented devices...

Apple makes millions on controlling access to content via the App Store. If anything, I'd think the right strategy seems to be develop the killer platform and monetize access to it. That's not standardization, that's a monopoly. Just like IGT had with the Telnaes patent, and look where they ended up...

I'm just musing on all this, ME. I do think it's possible that Apple's proprietariness is catching up to it, though. Android is just blowing up everything. Once the lid is off, there's no putting it back on.

I got nothing that says I'm right on that, it's just a feeling. Having used both machines, Apple and Windows/ iPhone and Android, I don't think there's enough difference between the experiences to say one is better than the other... so I think that in the long run the victor will be the more open platform. But I'm just another idiot with a keyboard, so take it for what its worth.

Hey guys... APPLE DID FAIL!! Totally! Don't you remember? It failed for the EXACT same reasons of propriatary ownership as DEC.

There would be NO APPLE today at all, were it not for Bill Gates. He bought $300,000,000 worth of worthless Apple stock, it was very recent in fact, resurrecting the company from certain bankrupcy.

He did it because Microsoft was alread getting pinched as being a monopoly... legislation had already been passed limiting what MS OS's could do because of the monopoly threat. Specifically, MS had to REMOVE from Windows 95 (I beleive) the automatic establishment of an MS HotMail account upon startup of their OutLook email program. Bill needed Apple to stay alive to serve as competition. Look it up.

He also did it becasue he and Jobs were old acid-trippin' buddies from the days of pre-DOS micro operating systems. Specifically, Jobs and Gates decided to drop acid before a big meeting with IBM. But Jobs then suddenly decided to take off and fly around in his airplane and screw the meeting. Gates, (on acid), met with IBM and sold them "DOS" which didnt even exist, it was an idea... he took a bunch of stolen code from the crew and re-wrote it into DOS for the next 7 days straight, including on the flight to White Planes, New York, IBM headquqarters. I understand that ol' Bill didn't shower for that entire week, and all his co-workers (and everyone else on the plane) were really bummed out at the stench. But he got it done, showed it to IBM, and that is EXACTLY how MicroSoft, the largest computing company ever, got started. AND SO, Bill felt like he owed his old pal Steve a little for stealing the company right out from under his nose. Look it up.

Pretty cool, eh?

Quote: discflicker

He also did it becasue he and Jobs were old acid-trippin' buddies from the days of pre-DOS micro operating systems. Specifically, Jobs and Gates decided to drop acid before a big meeting with IBM. But Jobs then suddenly decided to take off and fly around in his airplane and screw the meeting. Gates, (on acid), met with IBM and sold them "DOS" which didnt even exist, it was an idea... he took a bunch of stolen code from the crew and re-wrote it into DOS for the next 7 days straight, including on the flight to White Planes, New York, IBM headquqarters. I understand that ol' Bill didn't shower for that entire week, and all his co-workers (and everyone else on the plane) were really bummed out at the stench. But he got it done, showed it to IBM, and that is EXACTLY how MicroSoft, the largest computing company ever, got started. AND SO, Bill felt like he owed his old pal Steve a little for stealing the company right out from under his nose. Look it up.

Pretty cool, eh?

Gates didn't really steal DOS... he brought the writes to QDOS from another Seattle company and ported it to the 8088 system. They then brought out the QDOS company. MS already had MS-Basic at that point, which was got them in the door at IBM... they'd done stuff for the 8086 chip set that people were liking. Once sold and used, they then re-wrote it extensively for the second version. I think it was about this time Paul Allen was working extreme shifts and was also diagnosed with cancer, but managed to complete the rework before treatment, survival and then dropping out of active MS work.

I'm not sure Jobs and Gates met before 1981, or were acid-dropping buds... Gates is known to be rather straight laced, and Apple were trying to compete with IBM's personal PC around the time were talking about.

Course, QDOS was heavily influenced by CP/M (or |cpm as I used to know it on my old Amstrad 6128.... my first exposure to a more direct layer of an OS).

I did look it up, but couldn't find a quick reference to what you suggest.

Quote: discflicker

A quote from Dave: "Windows-NT = VMS + 1? What took you so long?"

This was refering to the rumor that the abbreviation WNT being VMS plus one letter

You probably know that HAL from "2001: A Space Odessy" is the same thing but -1.

Quote: s2dbaker

You probably know that HAL from "2001: A Space Odessy" is the same thing but -1.

It's close but not the same thing. The HAL = IBM - 1 situation was unintentional.

Well I'm not gonna start making up stories this late in my life. I heard about the Gates-Jobs acid trips 3rd-hand... from Dave Cutler to Jim Maddox (another DEC Guy) to me, and nether Jim nor Dave would lie (well, Jim for sure wouldn't have lied, and he told me it came straight from Cutler).

Jim's email is jmaddox1@ford.com if y'all question my honesty and want hear it directly from the horses mouth or need to ask him about ANYTHING I've said on this forum at all, including my world uptime record for a realtime engine plant application, or the installation base (> 200 plants, world-wide) of systems consisting of code I wrote 95% of over the past 20 years. Jkarr11@ford.com, jsisolak@ford.com, anyone who ever worked with me knows it all and will vouch for what I claim.


And YES, CP/M was the pre-DOS micro OS I claim Gates stole from Jobs, re-wrote in one week and then sold to IBM as DOS. MS-DOS came out later... my understanding of that was that Microsoft further enhanced it after IBM decided to abandon it and give it back to Gates to form MicroSoft upon.

Quote: discflicker

And YES, CP/M was the pre-DOS micro OS I claim Gates stole from Jobs, re-wrote in one week and then sold to IBM as DOS. MS-DOS came out later... my understanding of that was that Microsoft further enhanced it after IBM decided to abandon it and give it back to Gates to form MicroSoft upon.

QDOS was rebranded as MS-DOS was rebranded as PC-DOS (by IBM). With plenty of rework in between. If anyone got stolen from, it was SCP (Seattle Computer Products) whose QDOS/86-DOS Microsoft brought for 50k... not realizing they had a deal lined up with IBM...IBM didn't realize MS didn't have the product they were being sold (much as you say).

MS-DOS split from IBM around the late 80's, and that gave them room to really work on Windows based on MS-DOS... but they'd really grown based on all the IBM clones around in the mid-80's onwards. I don't think Gates did much of the rewrite at all, I think that was all by other coders in the team. Remember by 1980, Microsoft did have a successful version of Basic and were selling Bios code to people already. The great leap was not selling the full rights to MS-DOS to IBM... allowing them to resell to other equipment manufacturers. I could easily believe that someone did pull long shifts to get the code working on the x86's in time for IBM.

I'm only going by what I know from "official" sources, so I'm sure there's more to it underneath.