Reception
The VideoBrain largely failed to achieve commercial viability for a number of reasons. Poor design decisions hindered user acceptance; for example, the VideoBrain's confusing and user-unfriendly keyboard made even simple text entry a tedious process. Moreover, the computer did not offer the then-popular programming language BASIC, forcing users to instead to adopt APL/S - a far more obscure and difficult programming language. Finally, the VideoBrain software library had trouble reaching a key audience. Most available software was aimed at productivity or educational markets, and lacked any variety of entertainment titles.
Perhaps the largest contributor to the VideoBrain's failure was simply a lack of proper marketing and hardware availability. Public understanding of computers in 1977 was significantly lower than it is today, and many potential consumers simply did not understand the benefits of owning a home computer. Additionally, the VideoBrain was mainly sold through mail-order outfits, and only made a brief retail showing at Macy's Department Stores. (By contrast, video game consoles at the time were easily available in a number of department and toy chains, allowing them to far outsell the VideoBrain Computer System).
Read more about this topic: Video Brain Family Computer
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
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“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
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“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)