The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
knowled...@hotmail.com
The public history of the PC began in August 1981, when IBM first announced “The IBM Personal Computer.” . This was The original PC. The time period for the development of this landmark, legacy product was approximately a year. It must be remembered that IBM was a centralized committee paper top down organization at the time. Everything went by snail mail and paper, communication was slow and lines of communication as well as the necessary and ...
Read full article at http://www.knowledgefield.com/articles/the-development-of-the-vital-ibm-pc-in-spite-of-the-corporate-culture-of-ibm.shtml
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
trolling?
how 'bout the internal network ... world-wide
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet
larger than the arpanet/internet from just about the beginning
until possibly mid-85
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internet
the great switch-over from arpanet (host-to-host with homogeneous IMP
front-ends) to internetworking protocol was on 1jan83. internet was
somewhere between 100-250 nodes at the time (depending on how things
were counted). the internal network was far past that ... passing 1000
nodes that summer
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/internet.htm#22
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#112
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#8
various old email on a variety of subjects from the 70s & 80s
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html
after the 23jun69 unbundling announced, there was an effort to deploy
(360/67) cp67 machines in various datacenters to give branch office
technical people an opportunity to practice with operating systems
running in (the remote) cp67 virtual machines (logon from terminals in
the branch office to cp67 machines at remote datacenters). this was
called "HONE" (aka hands-on network experience). however, it was soon
taken over by applications (mostly written in APL) supporting the branch
office sales/marketing people (and the use by SEs for operating system
experience eventually was dropped). when EMEA hdqtrs moved from the US
to Paris in the early 70s ... I was called in to help with their HONE
installation. At that time, it still took a little ingenuity to read
email back in the states.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone
note that the "5150 computer" announced aug81 was predated by the "5100
computer" from the palo alto science center ... 5100 demo'ed 1973
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_1.html
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_2.html
also, note that the boca group doing the development was designated IBU
... independent business unit ... where some amount of corporate culture
command&control was much more relaxed ... for instance the standard A&R
(announce and review) product process requiring sign-off from possibly
nearly 500 executives from around the corporation.
The birth of the IBM PC
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc25/pc25_birth.html
misc. old posts:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#69 APL on PalmOS ???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000.html#70 APL on PalmOS ???
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2000d.html#15 APL version in IBM 5100 (Was: Resurrecting the IBM 1130)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#39 IBM 5100 [Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?]
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#43 IBM 5100 [Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?]
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#45 IBM 5100 [Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?]
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002b.html#47 IBM 5100 [Was: First DESKTOP Unix Box?]
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#79 IBM 5100
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#82 IBM 5100
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003i.html#84 IBM 5100
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003j.html#0 IBM 5100
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003n.html#6 The IBM 5100 and John Titor
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003n.html#8 The IBM 5100 and John Titor
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005m.html#2 IBM 5100 luggable computer with APL
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005m.html#3 IBM 5100 luggable computer with APL
parts of thread from last yr that might have some interest:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#43 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#45 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#46 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#65 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006o.html#66 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#15 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#31 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#34 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#36 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#39 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#40 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#46 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006p.html#47 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006q.html#24 "25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer"
Frank McCoy
>knowled...@hotmail.com writes:
>> The public history of the PC began in August 1981, when IBM first
>> announced 'The IBM Personal Computer.' . This was The original PC.
<Gasp, Choke, Giggle, Snort!>
The guy has *NO* fucking idea, does he?
>> The time period for the development of this landmark, legacy
>> product was approximately a year. It must be remembered that IBM was a
>> centralized committee paper top down organization at the
>> time. Everything went by snail mail and paper, communication was slow
>> and lines of communication as well as the necessary and ...
>>
>> Read full article at http://www.knowledgefield.com/articles/the-development-of-the-vital-ibm-pc-in-spite-of-the-corporate-culture-of-ibm.shtml
>
>trolling?
Quite obviously so.
The IBM PC not only was far from the first; it was VERY far from being
the best for its time. Close to the worst, in fact; especially for the
money. Compared to say the Zenith 100, it was a pile of crap. What it
had going for it, was the IBM logo on the outside of the packing-case;
and nothing else; since damned little of the machine itself was even
made by IBM.
However, that seems to have been enough and more-so.
The quote at the time was, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
Oops ... I forgot:
The IBM PC *did* have on other thing going for it; something IBM later
dearly regretted; but that was a large portion of the key that made the
machine such a success: A fairly open architecture. If it had been
closed, like IBM later wished it had done, then other open architectures
would likely have squashed it flat. It was the clone market, something
IBM hated, that to a considerable extent made the machine the success it
was.
--
_____
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,-/-, __ __. ____ /_
(_/ / (_(_/|_/ / <_/ <_
Phil Payne
spell checked. Still makes as little sense.
--
Phil Payne
http://www.isham-research.co.uk
+44 7833 654 800
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Philip Nasadowski
Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com> wrote:
> Oops ... I forgot:
> The IBM PC *did* have on other thing going for it; something IBM later
> dearly regretted; but that was a large portion of the key that made the
> machine such a success: A fairly open architecture.
Wasn't the theory of publishing a bios listing and EVERY detail of the
thing basically that if anyone 'cloned' the PC, IBM could squash them in
court, since the BIOS was copyrighted code, and it would be darn hard to
claim you never saw it, given a paper copy was included with every
machine? IIRC, IBM did indeed squash a few clones until the infamous
'white room' reverse engineering of it.
And heck, most clones weren't really 100% compatible.
I suspect, at some point, IBM just stopped caring, either thinking the
PC would be a fad, that a totally uncontrolled archetecture would fall
from the effects of everyone pulling every which way (let's face it,
computer companies can't follow standards at all. It's amazing the
plugs on most PCs fit into outlets, given how horrible they are at
following standards), or they just figured the PS/2 would settle it (the
sad thing was, it was a decent series of machines).
Then again, I wonder if anyone in the early 80's would have thought, in
2007, that IBM wouldn't be making "IBMs", that Apple would be selling
UNIX machines with Intel chips (and a Walkman-like music player), that
Compaq would have bought DEC, and that HP would be out of the test
equipment business?
Oh yeah, and that the lowly mainframe...would STILL be around, and
thriving...
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
> Then again, I wonder if anyone in the early 80's would have thought, in
> 2007, that IBM wouldn't be making "IBMs", that Apple would be selling
> UNIX machines with Intel chips (and a Walkman-like music player), that
> Compaq would have bought DEC, and that HP would be out of the test
> equipment business?
>
> Oh yeah, and that the lowly mainframe...would STILL be around, and
> thriving...
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#42 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
tandem bought atalla, compaq bought tandem and dec, and hp bought compaq
... so what URL to you get when you do
www.atalla.com
?
68k, not intel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX
i've some vague memories of getting to play with prerelease version.
Joe Pfeiffer
> In article <195b735ifm9uja8o5...@4ax.com>,
> Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com> wrote:
>
> > Oops ... I forgot:
> > The IBM PC *did* have on other thing going for it; something IBM later
> > dearly regretted; but that was a large portion of the key that made the
> > machine such a success: A fairly open architecture.
>
> Wasn't the theory of publishing a bios listing and EVERY detail of the
> thing basically that if anyone 'cloned' the PC, IBM could squash them in
> court, since the BIOS was copyrighted code, and it would be darn hard to
> claim you never saw it, given a paper copy was included with every
> machine? IIRC, IBM did indeed squash a few clones until the infamous
> 'white room' reverse engineering of it.
I've never heard of IBM squashing any clones...
> And heck, most clones weren't really 100% compatible.
Yep -- that was the downfall of more clones than I can count. They'd
make improvements; the improvements would make them less than 100%
compatible, the clone would die. TI, HP (who sort of kept plugging
away until they got to 100%)...
AZ Nomad
>I suspect, at some point, IBM just stopped caring, either thinking the
>PC would be a fad, that a totally uncontrolled archetecture would fall
>from the effects of everyone pulling every which way (let's face it,
Actually, what happened is that IBM wasn't the first to bring out a 386 box.
Compaq beat them to it, and everybody built PCs based on the compaq and later
the ISA standards. IBM got pushed out of a market they had created.
IBM retreated into their own little world with their microchannel PS/2s and
then was surprised as hell when nobody wanted to clone them nor buy them
either.
Quadibloc
> Philip Nasadowski <nasa...@usermale.com> writes:
.
> > Wasn't the theory of publishing a bios listing and EVERY detail of the
> > thing basically that if anyone 'cloned' the PC, IBM could squash them in
> > court, since the BIOS was copyrighted code, and it would be darn hard to
> > claim you never saw it, given a paper copy was included with every
> > machine? IIRC, IBM did indeed squash a few clones until the infamous
> > 'white room' reverse engineering of it.
.
> I've never heard of IBM squashing any clones...
Oh, yes, they did. There was a Canadian portable clone that was a bit
smaller than the original Compaq that was one of the ones that was
eliminated from the market because of a successful claim of BIOS
infringement, the Hyperion.
John Savard
Quadibloc
> The IBM PC not only was far from the first; it was VERY far from being
> the best for its time. Close to the worst, in fact; especially for the
> money. Compared to say the Zenith 100, it was a pile of crap. What it
> had going for it, was the IBM logo on the outside of the packing-case;
> and nothing else; since damned little of the machine itself was even
> made by IBM.
Looking through an old book from 1983 showing the kinds of computers
available back then, if you wanted a computer with a 16-bit chip, you
had to pay about $5,000-$6,000. The IBM PC wasn't a "true" 16-bit
computer in some ways, having an 8-bit bus, but it still had the other
benefits of the 8088's 16-bit architecture - like the ability to be
expanded up to 640K bytes of RAM. The IBM PC was more expensive than,
but priced competitively with, 8-bit computers running CPM that were
limited to 64K (or 128K with a kludge) bytes of memory.
Of course, the IBM name, plus the fact of a design that closely
resembled the existing CP/M machines without being compatible, did
definitely help get software developed for it, and the prospect of
having a choice of software helped to sell it. But it *did* hit a
price/performance "sweet spot".
Microsoft Windows dominates the world today for the same reason - it's
the _de facto_ standard for which you have the best chance of getting
software. But it only became a success in the beginning because it
*did* offer value; if you already had a PC, it was cheaper to spend
about $100 on a program than to run out and buy a whole new computer
(i.e., a Macintosh) to have a graphical user interface.
John Savard
Quadibloc
> IBM retreated into their own little world with their microchannel PS/2s and
> then was surprised as hell when nobody wanted to clone them nor buy them
> either.
That's not quite fair. Radio Shack actually licensed the Micro Channel
Architecture, and used it on some of their machines.
John Savard
Chris Mason
invisible to e-mail users of the list. I know only because I get a digest of
IBM-MAIN.
If anyone wants to check what's being said, here's the Google Groups URL for
supposedly "Today's most active topic":
http://groups.google.com/group/bit.listserv.ibm-main/browse_thread/thread/b05f97eb68ef1fbf?hl=en
To those who contributed in such a "hidden" manner, please consider joining
the vast majority of us and use e-mails.
Chris Mason
[1] It helps that it was a Sunday!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Phil Payne" <ph...@ibm-main.lst>
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main
To: <IBM-...@BAMA.UA.EDU>
Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2007 3:51 PM
Subject: The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate
Culture of IBM
Dan Espen
> There's an extensive discussion sparked by this topic which is quite
> invisible to e-mail users of the list. I know only because I get a
> digest of IBM-MAIN.
>
> If anyone wants to check what's being said, here's the Google Groups
> URL for supposedly "Today's most active topic":
>
> http://groups.google.com/group/bit.listserv.ibm-main/browse_thread/thread/b05f97eb68ef1fbf?hl=en
>
> To those who contributed in such a "hidden" manner, please consider
> joining the vast majority of us and use e-mails.
Email to alt.foklore.computers?
Ain't gonna happen.
Frank McCoy
wrote:
Yup ... As *would* have happened with the PC itself if they'd been that
tight-assed with it. They just didn't *get* the fact that the open bus
and configuration was what made the PC popular. IOW, it was the
*competition* that made it such a huge success.
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
> Yup ... As *would* have happened with the PC itself if they'd been
> that tight-assed with it. They just didn't *get* the fact that the
> open bus and configuration was what made the PC popular. IOW, it was
> the *competition* that made it such a huge success.
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#42 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#44 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
as i've mentioned before ... the other market force was that the
previous personal computers had been do-it-yourself and hobbiest market.
individuals had to justify the cost of the box for their own personal
interest ... that included a lot of the software ... not a lot of
off-the-shelf stuff ... so individuals had to do that themselves also.
big break-out for ibm/pc was selling it into terminal emulation market
at businesses. business that had justified buying a couple thousand or
tens of thousand (3270) terminals ... for about the same amount of money
that provided both local computing and terminal emulation in a single
desktop footprint. instead of selling one at a time to a very limited
market ... orders were being taken for thousands at a time. these
(business) install base motivated a lot of the business users and
software entrepreneurs to write software applications for the install
base. having growing library of useful software tools for the market
segment ... made it easier to justify spending the money to buy the
machine. the combination of growing install base and growing available
application creates snowball effect (positive feedback). misc. past
posts mentioning various aspects of the terminal emulation theme
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation
the business market potential significantly motivated the clone makers
... something that had been happening in the mainframe dataprocessing
business market since at least the late 60s (and so wasn't that unique
of a concept). misc. past posts mentioning (mainframe) plug compatible
(clone)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#360pcm
this was enormous synergistic effect ... that wouldn't happen in the
purely home/hobbiest market ... since the purchase price for strictly
individuals was still fairly significant with not a large number of
"solutions" to attact a big following. possibly one of the biggest
drivers of personal computers into the home/personal market was the
internet ... the volumes from the business world were driving down the
price point and the combination of the price-point and internet as a
"personal" use (for the computers) ... then helped explode the sales
into the home market (aka killer app/silver bullet for personal,
personal computer use).
recent references:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#11 Newbie question on table design
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007j.html#71 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007k.html#68 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007l.html#37 Friday musings on the future of 3270 applications
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
> Microsoft Windows dominates the world today for the same reason - it's
> the _de facto_ standard for which you have the best chance of getting
> software. But it only became a success in the beginning because it
> *did* offer value; if you already had a PC, it was cheaper to spend
> about $100 on a program than to run out and buy a whole new computer
> (i.e., a Macintosh) to have a graphical user interface.
But that's not how Windows got to dominate the market - Windows got
to dominate the market when Windows 3 started to come bundled on every PC
you could buy.
--
C:>WIN | Directable Mirror Arrays
The computer obeys and wins. | A better way to focus the sun
You lose and Bill collects. | licences available see
| http://www.sohara.org/
Howard Brazee
wrote:
>Microsoft Windows dominates the world today for the same reason - it's
>the _de facto_ standard for which you have the best chance of getting
>software. But it only became a success in the beginning because it
>*did* offer value; if you already had a PC, it was cheaper to spend
>about $100 on a program than to run out and buy a whole new computer
>(i.e., a Macintosh) to have a graphical user interface.
How many bought PCs without Windows and then decided to buy Windows?
Or even who bought PCs without DOS and then decided to buy DOS?
krw
mcc...@millcomm.com says...
Microchannel's purpose in life wasn't to take the market back, rather
to get a handle around the costs of maintaining thousands of PCs.
ISA was a mess in the corporate world. EISA was a disaster of a
different sort. Microchannle worked and worked well until replaced
by PCI, which was successful only because it wasn't Microchannel yet
accomplished many of the same requirements.
--
Keith
Rupert Goodwins
> In article <6o9d739l8use51aot1s4jcva1egh727...@4ax.com>,
> mcc...@millcomm.com says...
>
>
>
> > In alt.folklore.computers AZ Nomad <aznoma...@PremoveOBthisOX.COM>
> > wrote:
>
> > >On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 02:24:44 GMT, Philip Nasadowski <nasado...@usermale.com> wrote:
>
> > >>I suspect, at some point, IBM just stopped caring, either thinking the
> > >>PC would be a fad, that a totally uncontrolled archetecture would fall
> > >>from the effects of everyone pulling every which way (let's face it,
>
> > >Actually, what happened is that IBM wasn't the first to bring out a 386 box.
> > >Compaq beat them to it, and everybody built PCs based on the compaq and later
> > >the ISA standards. IBM got pushed out of a market they had created.
> > >IBM retreated into their own little world with their microchannel PS/2s and
> > >then was surprised as hell when nobody wanted to clone them nor buy them
> > >either.
>
> > Yup ... As *would* have happened with the PC itself if they'd been that
> > tight-assed with it. They just didn't *get* the fact that the open bus
> > and configuration was what made the PC popular. IOW, it was the
> > *competition* that made it such a huge success.
>
> Microchannel's purpose in life wasn't to take the market back, rather
> to get a handle around the costs of maintaining thousands of PCs.
> ISA was a mess in the corporate world. EISA was a disaster of a
> different sort. Microchannle worked and worked well until replaced
> by PCI, which was successful only because it wasn't Microchannel yet
> accomplished many of the same requirements.
>
> --
> Keith
The microchannel hardware may have worked well, but the cost and
complexity of developing for the standard was orders of magnitude
higher than for EISA. It's most certainly true that EISA was a _very_
loose standard (to the point that some of the signal timings were
impossible at maximum tolerance, there wasn't even a proper mounting
bracket spec, and some completely unspecified aspects could and did
bite you -- ground undershoot bad enough to lock up chips because of
the amount of charge dumped on the substrate due to clamp diodes,
anyone? And that's before some of the 'creative' interpretations from
some PC OEMs.). But MCA - just hacking through the process of getting
a driver to the point that it could be installed was nightmarish. I
forget, thankfully, the details -- I was working for a company in the
late 80s which designed network adaptors -- but there were aspects of
it which, while clearly designed to maintain control of the standard
by IBM, had the side-effect of making it very much more painful to
develop for.
And once you'd done that, you found there was no market. With EISA,
you ended up with a constant stream of things to fix as this or that
OEM pushed this or that piece of junk onto the market -- for some
reason, European PC makers were the worst, like Tulip, Philips,
Schneider and above all, ABOVE ALL, Olivetti (may Allah curse all
their designers' children with small doo-dahs, especially the
daughters) -- but at least you sold enough to make it worthwhile.
R
hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com
> The IBM PC not only was far from the first; it was VERY far from being
> the best for its time. Close to the worst, in fact; especially for the
> money. Compared to say the Zenith 100, it was a pile of crap. What it
> had going for it, was the IBM logo on the outside of the packing-case;
> and nothing else; since damned little of the machine itself was even
> made by IBM.
Obviously the IBM PC wasn't the first. But putting the IBM label on
it helped legitimatize the PC as a business tool instead of a lab
curiosity or hobbyist toy.
As was traditional with IBM's computers, they offered the PC not only
as a piece of hardware, but also with a suite of applications to run
with it. Perhaps the early IBM applications (e.g. its "assistant
series") weren't as good as independent offerings available on other
machines, but they were together as a suite. The large sales volume
of the IBM unit encouraged independent developers to create stuff and
they did.
Throughout its history IBM info-processing products were often more
expensive and less technically sophisticated then the competition.
But IBM's total systems approach, which included the PC, meant a great
deal to business.
> However, that seems to have been enough and more-so.
> The quote at the time was, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
For many good reasons in the corporate world. Not that IBM was
perfect, but so many of its competitors were so clueless in delivering
a * workable and reliable system *.
> The IBM PC *did* have on other thing going for it; something IBM later
> dearly regretted; but that was a large portion of the key that made the
> machine such a success: A fairly open architecture. If it had been
> closed, like IBM later wished it had done, then other open architectures
> would likely have squashed it flat. It was the clone market, something
> IBM hated, that to a considerable extent made the machine the success it
> was.
Certainly the open architecture did exactly what it was supposed to
do: encourage external parties to develop hardware and software to
sell for the IBM PC to increase its value to customers. Without that,
there would've been far fewer sales. I think IBM came out ahead by
having it open, despite later losing business to the clones.
I think IBM lost the advanced (286 and onward) business since the
clones proved to be more nimble and competitve than IBM's top-heavy
corporate world was. I understand that IBM's PC was initially
developed and marketed by a separate unit, but that unit was later
absorbed back into the corporation. I think IBM's biggest mistake was
that takeback, had they left the PC unit independent as before it
would've done better.
I don't know the actual facts on the contract between IBM and
Microsoft to produce the first DOS (which MS got from someone else).
But maybe IBM should've asked for exclusive rights to it, back then MS
probably would've agreed to it.
But again, having a healthy clone market actually helped sell IBM
units, be they PCs or mainframes. It widens the installed base and
brings costs down to all, improving sales.
Back in the 1960s there was a big market in peripherals for IBM
mainframes. IBM was mad because employees would quit and steal
proprietary designs and undersell IBM. But IBM had trouble meeting
the enormous demand for S/360 as it was and the peripherals helped
out. Again, the cheaper widened the marketplace, since customers
weren't choosing between cheaper and IBM, but between cheaper or no
computer at all.
Thompson, Steve
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-...@ibm-main.lst
Behalf Of Howard Brazee
Sent: Monday, June 18, 2007 12:47 PM
To: IBM-...@BAMA.UA.EDU
Subject: Re: The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the
Corporate Culture of IBM
On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 21:22:24 -0700, in bit.listserv.ibm-main you
wrote:
>Microsoft Windows dominates the world today for the same reason - it's
>the _de facto_ standard for which you have the best chance of getting
>software. But it only became a success in the beginning because it
>*did* offer value; if you already had a PC, it was cheaper to spend
>about $100 on a program than to run out and buy a whole new computer
>(i.e., a Macintosh) to have a graphical user interface.
How many bought PCs without Windows and then decided to buy Windows?
Or even who bought PCs without DOS and then decided to buy DOS?
<SNIP>
Better yet, try to buy a NAME computer that doesn't have an O/S, or has
Linux (any distribution) pre-installed.
I have found that it actually cost MORE to get a machine W/O M/$'s
Windows!
--
Steve Thompson
McKown, John
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List
> [mailto:IBM-...@BAMA.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Thompson, Steve
> Sent: Monday, June 18, 2007 1:48 PM
> To: IBM-...@BAMA.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of
> the Corporate Culture of IBM
>
>
<snip>
> Better yet, try to buy a NAME computer that doesn't have an
> O/S, or has
> Linux (any distribution) pre-installed.
Dell will now pre-install Ubuntu on certain desktops and laptops. But
not the "really powerful" ones. I don't know the relative costs because
I haven't bothered to look. I get "white box" PCs.
>
> I have found that it actually cost MORE to get a machine W/O M/$'s
> Windows!
Hum, I know of some web sites to pick up desktops, servers, and laptops
with Linux preinstalled. However, I don't know if it is possible to get
an equivalent PC elsewhere (with M$ software) for less. I do know that
these places will install Windows for you, but it is extra cost - the
same as it would cost you to buy Windows yourself ($100 last I looked).
>
> --
> Steve Thompson
--
John McKown
Senior Systems Programmer
HealthMarkets
Keeping the Promise of Affordable Coverage
Administrative Services Group
Information Technology
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David Powell
Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com> in alt.folklore.computers writ:
Not the only company to make that mistake. DEC had their BI chip and
BI corner to control third party hardware for VAX. .
Regards,
David P.
Tom Marchant
>as i've mentioned before ... the other market force was that the
>previous personal computers had been do-it-yourself and hobbiest market.
>individuals had to justify the cost of the box for their own personal
>interest ... that included a lot of the software ... not a lot of
>off-the-shelf stuff ... so individuals had to do that themselves also.
I disagree. When the IBM PC was introduced, it was most certainly not
distinguished in that regard. There was in fact a lot of off-the-shelf software
available for the Apple II, the Atari 800 and the TRS-80. When it was
introduced, it was as much a hobbyist's computer as the others.
--
Tom Marchant
Howard Brazee
>How many bought PCs without Windows and then decided to buy Windows?
>
>Or even who bought PCs without DOS and then decided to buy DOS?
><SNIP>
>
>Better yet, try to buy a NAME computer that doesn't have an O/S, or has
>Linux (any distribution) pre-installed.
>
>I have found that it actually cost MORE to get a machine W/O M/$'s
>Windows!
Actually, I have done this on my wife's Macintosh, and will do it
again when I buy mine.
Frank McCoy
>In article <6o9d739l8use51aot...@4ax.com>,
>mcc...@millcomm.com says...
>> In alt.folklore.computers AZ Nomad <azno...@PremoveOBthisOX.COM>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 02:24:44 GMT, Philip Nasadowski <nasa...@usermale.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >>I suspect, at some point, IBM just stopped caring, either thinking the
>> >>PC would be a fad, that a totally uncontrolled archetecture would fall
>> >>from the effects of everyone pulling every which way (let's face it,
>> >
>> >Actually, what happened is that IBM wasn't the first to bring out a 386 box.
>> >Compaq beat them to it, and everybody built PCs based on the compaq and later
>> >the ISA standards. IBM got pushed out of a market they had created.
>> >IBM retreated into their own little world with their microchannel PS/2s and
>> >then was surprised as hell when nobody wanted to clone them nor buy them
>> >either.
>>
>> Yup ... As *would* have happened with the PC itself if they'd been that
>> tight-assed with it. They just didn't *get* the fact that the open bus
>> and configuration was what made the PC popular. IOW, it was the
>> *competition* that made it such a huge success.
>>
>
>Microchannel's purpose in life wasn't to take the market back, rather
>to get a handle around the costs of maintaining thousands of PCs.
>ISA was a mess in the corporate world. EISA was a disaster of a
>different sort.
I dunno ... For quite a while I had a considerable number of EISA boards
in various machines ... All working quite well.
The only complaint *I* had about the bus was the *length* of the cards.
Instead of getting smaller and more compact, they were huge.
Actually, my EISA SCSI boards worked *much* better than their
replacement PCI crap did. It was moving to PCI that pretty much forced
me to scrap all my (still working) SCSI drives.
No, I don't know if it was the interface, the cards, or the
motherboards. I just knew it didn't work. Couldn't afford
experimenting, replacing each, until I got a working system; though I
did to a certain extent: 3 SCSI boards and two different motherboards.
By then good (and large) ATA drives worked well enough (and finally fast
enough) to replace them.
Still got the Adaptek cards and two drives stowed away somewhere ....
> Microchannle worked and worked well until replaced
>by PCI, which was successful only because it wasn't Microchannel yet
>accomplished many of the same requirements.
--
Frank McCoy
They *thought* they had.
MicroSoft disagreed.
*HUGE* lawsuit over that.
MicroSoft won.
Funny that:
At the time the lawsuit was filed, I'm pretty sure IBM had more
*lawyers* on their staff than MicroSoft had total staff.
Of course, most of those IBM lawyers (as I recall again) were mainly
employed in anti-trust lawsuits. Now it's M$ with that job.
>
>But again, having a healthy clone market actually helped sell IBM
>units, be they PCs or mainframes. It widens the installed base and
>brings costs down to all, improving sales.
>
>Back in the 1960s there was a big market in peripherals for IBM
>mainframes. IBM was mad because employees would quit and steal
>proprietary designs and undersell IBM. But IBM had trouble meeting
>the enormous demand for S/360 as it was and the peripherals helped
>out. Again, the cheaper widened the marketplace, since customers
>weren't choosing between cheaper and IBM, but between cheaper or no
>computer at all.
>
--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
> As was traditional with IBM's computers, they offered the PC not only
> as a piece of hardware, but also with a suite of applications to run
> with it. Perhaps the early IBM applications (e.g. its "assistant
> series") weren't as good as independent offerings available on other
> machines, but they were together as a suite. The large sales volume
> of the IBM unit encouraged independent developers to create stuff and
> they did.
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#42 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#44 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#45 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
the other way of looking at it was that the 3270 terminals tended to be
more expensive than terminals in use by most other vendors ... but was a
enormously larger market than the personal computer market at the time
3270 terminal clone offerings tended to be same function at lower price.
The IBM/PC could be viewed as a 3270 terminal clone for approx the same
price with potential for lot more function. For a business/customer that
had already allocated the money to buy huge numbers of 3270 terminals
... is was a moderate no-brainer business decision (requiring very
little incremental justification) to purchse IBM/PCs in place of (the
already justified) 3270s.
The business didn't have to go thru a lengthy process for coming up with
a separate financial justificiation for each IBM/PCs ... they just took
something that was already financially justified and applied it to the
IBM/PC .... which eliminated a significant market/business inhibitor
... how to get a business to fully financially justify a few tens of
thousand IBM/PCs ... purely based on the extremely limited personal
computing aspect that nearly nobody was familiar with. Even with the IBM
name behind it ... business people were still going to ask where is the
return-on-investment. In effect, the machine could be bought based on
the already justified terminal need ... and the personal computing
aspect then becomes a no (incremental) cost experiment ... the price of the
machine didn't have to be justified on any (totally unknown) possible
personal computing benefit.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation
Frank McCoy
... and (of course) no other "Personal Computer" other than the IBM PC
could do 3270 emulation for that price.
Yeah, right.
Like I said, there were other, far BETTER "Personal Computers" back
then, that did more, and cost far less. They just didn't have the IBM
logo on them. The IBM PC didn't even have the advantage of being made
at IBM. All it *did* really have was the logo on the box as an
advantage over the competition ... computer OR terminal-emulator.
But that sigil on the cardboard container was more than enough.
When compared with machines already on the market, like the Zenith-100,
in price, performance, graphics ability, clarity, ease-of-use, ease of
setup, ruggedness, MTBF, size, compatibility with existing software, or
about any criteria you'd like to pick, frankly the IBM PC *stank*.
Its advantage was the NAME on the box.
Period. No followup.
But that was more than enough.
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
> Like I said, there were other, far BETTER "Personal Computers" back
> then, that did more, and cost far less. They just didn't have the IBM
> logo on them. The IBM PC didn't even have the advantage of being made
> at IBM. All it *did* really have was the logo on the box as an
> advantage over the competition ... computer OR terminal-emulator.
>
> But that sigil on the cardboard container was more than enough.
>
> When compared with machines already on the market, like the Zenith-100,
> in price, performance, graphics ability, clarity, ease-of-use, ease of
> setup, ruggedness, MTBF, size, compatibility with existing software, or
> about any criteria you'd like to pick, frankly the IBM PC *stank*.
>
> Its advantage was the NAME on the box.
> Period. No followup.
> But that was more than enough.
so at one level ... the issue is trying to greatly expand the personal
computing market ... and get people to justify a lot of money on
relatively little understood characteristics of what benefit came from
buying a personal computer .... or selling into the terminal emulation
market ... which was significantly larger than the personal computing
market, pretty well understood ... and large business segments believed
they understood what they were paying for.
in the 3270 terminal emulation/clone market ... if the majority of the
people had very little understanding about what personal computing
represented ... any argument based purely on pros/cons of personal
computing would have little impact/meaning .... lets say that 3270
terminal emulation/clone was 95% of the business decision ... and
possibly less than 5% was in anyway related to personal computing
attributes.
so another characteristic of the 3270 terminal market was actually
having a commercial/business sales channel ... of course the name helped
... but having a sales/marketing force that was already dealing with the
target market segment and they could pitch the ibm/pc as same price and
value add to what you were already decided on spending on 3270 ... was a
relatively easy sell. For a business person to make a decision about
some other terminal emulator/clone ... they actually had to be aware
that it existed.
I would contend that the name alone wouldn't have been sufficient w/o
also having the commercial/business sales channel in that specific
market segment. Some analogies of that exist today ... looking at some
of the business analysis stuff of where the sales channels are
positioned for some of the current name brand personal computing vendors
... and how they break out in commerical/business market segment
vis-a-vis consumer market segment.
Greg Menke
Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com> writes:
> In alt.folklore.computers krw <k...@att.bizzzz> wrote:
>
> >
> >Microchannel's purpose in life wasn't to take the market back, rather
> >to get a handle around the costs of maintaining thousands of PCs.
> >ISA was a mess in the corporate world. EISA was a disaster of a
> >different sort.
>
> I dunno ... For quite a while I had a considerable number of EISA boards
> in various machines ... All working quite well.
>
> The only complaint *I* had about the bus was the *length* of the cards.
> Instead of getting smaller and more compact, they were huge.
They were a bit unweildy, as were the VESA localbus boards.
> Actually, my EISA SCSI boards worked *much* better than their
> replacement PCI crap did. It was moving to PCI that pretty much forced
> me to scrap all my (still working) SCSI drives.
>
> No, I don't know if it was the interface, the cards, or the
> motherboards. I just knew it didn't work. Couldn't afford
> experimenting, replacing each, until I got a working system; though I
> did to a certain extent: 3 SCSI boards and two different motherboards.
>
> By then good (and large) ATA drives worked well enough (and finally fast
> enough) to replace them.
I don't know why moving to PCI should stop you from using scsi, all my
important drive arrays are on scsi, some of the arrays moved from sbus
to pci controllers as the Sun boxes were upgraded, all very drama-free.
Now if you mean scsi on PC's, then sure- its on the messy side to say
the least.
Gregm
Frank McCoy
OK ... I'll grant you that a proper (and large) sales force had a lot of
weight.
jmfb...@aol.com
Steve O'Hara-Smith <ste...@eircom.net> wrote:
>On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 21:22:24 -0700
>Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>
>> Microsoft Windows dominates the world today for the same reason - it's
>> the _de facto_ standard for which you have the best chance of getting
>> software. But it only became a success in the beginning because it
>> *did* offer value; if you already had a PC, it was cheaper to spend
>> about $100 on a program than to run out and buy a whole new computer
>> (i.e., a Macintosh) to have a graphical user interface.
>
> But that's not how Windows got to dominate the market - Windows got
>to dominate the market when Windows 3 started to come bundled on every PC
>you could buy.
And the vehicle was games. If you want to know what MS is going
to do with its future monitor releases, watch the work done on
the games. Oh, yeah, keep in mind that its trade-off razor is
distribution.
/BAH
krw
rup...@gmail.com says...
Only if you didn't care if the EISA card worked, or not. EISA was a
non-standard and everyone designed it differently.
> It's most certainly true that EISA was a _very_
> loose standard (to the point that some of the signal timings were
> impossible at maximum tolerance, there wasn't even a proper mounting
> bracket spec, and some completely unspecified aspects could and did
> bite you -- ground undershoot bad enough to lock up chips because of
> the amount of charge dumped on the substrate due to clamp diodes,
> anyone? And that's before some of the 'creative' interpretations from
> some PC OEMs.).
These aren't good things if your mission was to build a working
product.
> But MCA - just hacking through the process of getting
> a driver to the point that it could be installed was nightmarish. I
> forget, thankfully, the details -- I was working for a company in the
> late 80s which designed network adaptors -- but there were aspects of
> it which, while clearly designed to maintain control of the standard
> by IBM, had the side-effect of making it very much more painful to
> develop for.
PCI isn't a piece of cake to design for either. Making things simple
is complicated. ;-) AIUI, If you'd bought the support ($10K, IIRC),
IBM would help through the rough stuff.
> And once you'd done that, you found there was no market.
Late, there may not have been a market. There were more than a few
Microchannel systems built.
> With EISA,
> you ended up with a constant stream of things to fix as this or that
> OEM pushed this or that piece of junk onto the market -- for some
> reason, European PC makers were the worst, like Tulip, Philips,
> Schneider and above all, ABOVE ALL, Olivetti (may Allah curse all
> their designers' children with small doo-dahs, especially the
> daughters) -- but at least you sold enough to make it worthwhile.
>
I moved into a department (working on the next product that was never
to be) got stuck in the design-fab-test-repeat spin cycle on an EISA
controller. There was no way to get the thing working in all
systems. The only saving grace of EISA was that no one actually
used it.
--
Keith
krw
You got lucky. It was a poorly designed "standard" that didn't work,
as designed. On top of that, everyone had a different interpretation
of "work".
>
> The only complaint *I* had about the bus was the *length* of the cards.
> Instead of getting smaller and more compact, they were huge.
No one wanted to fork over for integrated solutions. More
complication => more circuits => bigger cards.
> Actually, my EISA SCSI boards worked *much* better than their
> replacement PCI crap did. It was moving to PCI that pretty much forced
> me to scrap all my (still working) SCSI drives.
?? I've had many SCSI drives and controllers. I tended to stick
with the Adaptec 2940 series though.
> No, I don't know if it was the interface, the cards, or the
> motherboards. I just knew it didn't work. Couldn't afford
> experimenting, replacing each, until I got a working system; though I
> did to a certain extent: 3 SCSI boards and two different motherboards.
Never had a problem, even with the integrated controllers. It sounds
like you were buying crap.
> By then good (and large) ATA drives worked well enough (and finally fast
> enough) to replace them.
In many cases faster.
> Still got the Adaptek cards and two drives stowed away somewhere ....
The optical drives in one of my systems (not currently on line) are
all SCSI on an Adaptec 3940. As you said, IDE works fine these days.
--
Keith
Quadibloc
> On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 21:22:24 -0700
> Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>
> > Microsoft Windows dominates the world today for the same reason - it's
> > the _de facto_ standard for which you have the best chance of getting
> > software. But it only became a success in the beginning because it
> > *did* offer value; if you already had a PC, it was cheaper to spend
> > about $100 on a program than to run out and buy a whole new computer
> > (i.e., a Macintosh) to have a graphical user interface.
>
> But that's not how Windows got to dominate the market - Windows got
> to dominate the market when Windows 3 started to come bundled on every PC
> you could buy.
Windows 95 came bundled on every PC you could buy.
Windows 3 never dominated the market, as it didn't have TrueType fonts
yet. However, it did come bundled with *something*. You could get a
copy for free if you bought a Logitech mouse.
Windows 3.1 included TrueType fonts, Microsoft licensing that from
Apple. Then, since applications weren't being written for Windows,
Microsoft wrote a Windows version of Microsoft Office. Once Windows
3.1 showed some value - there was software for it, because otherwise
being a cheaper GUI than buying a Mac wouldn't have value - it started
to sell.
Computer makers only started bundling Windows 3.1 on their computers
after it had already become popular, due to the software base having
grown to include a significant amount of third-party software.
In any event, after Microsoft obtained a strong position in the
market, *then* it was able to fold Windows into DOS, and produce
Windows 95. Which became bundled on every PC you could buy the way MS-
DOS had been. And Microsoft advised software makers that the Windows
logo could now only be used on software that was designed for Windows
95.
Microsoft only abused its market power when it had some market power
to abuse. They were not capable of creating a monopoly out of thin
air, any more than any other company.
John Savard
Frank McCoy
I've got about four versions of those ....
>> No, I don't know if it was the interface, the cards, or the
>> motherboards. I just knew it didn't work. Couldn't afford
>> experimenting, replacing each, until I got a working system; though I
>> did to a certain extent: 3 SCSI boards and two different motherboards.
>
>Never had a problem, even with the integrated controllers. It sounds
>like you were buying crap.
>
Like I said above, most were Adaptec and the latest versions at the time
as well.
>> By then good (and large) ATA drives worked well enough (and finally fast
>> enough) to replace them.
>
>In many cases faster.
>
>> Still got the Adaptek cards and two drives stowed away somewhere ....
>
>The optical drives in one of my systems (not currently on line) are
>all SCSI on an Adaptec 3940. As you said, IDE works fine these days.
Yep. Loved SCSI when it worked.
When going to the later motherboards with newer PCI and eventually AGP
slots, they stopped working. Couldn't afford to experiment to find out
why.
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
> Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:
> > On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 21:22:24 -0700
> > Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
> >
> > > Microsoft Windows dominates the world today for the same reason - it's
> > > the _de facto_ standard for which you have the best chance of getting
> > > software. But it only became a success in the beginning because it
> > > *did* offer value; if you already had a PC, it was cheaper to spend
> > > about $100 on a program than to run out and buy a whole new computer
> > > (i.e., a Macintosh) to have a graphical user interface.
> >
> > But that's not how Windows got to dominate the market - Windows
> > got to dominate the market when Windows 3 started to come bundled on
> > every PC you could buy.
>
> Windows 95 came bundled on every PC you could buy.
Windows 3.0 was the first version to come pre-installed and (at
least in Europe) it came pre-installed on just about every PC available.
> In any event, after Microsoft obtained a strong position in the
> market, *then* it was able to fold Windows into DOS, and produce
> Windows 95. Which became bundled on every PC you could buy the way MS-
> DOS had been.
MS-DOS had never been bundled - prior to Windows bundling it was
normal to be asked if you wanted MS-DOS, PC-DOS or DR-DOS, and not to be
surprised if you said "None thanks.".
Eugene Miya
Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com> wrote:
>Like I said, there were other, far BETTER "Personal Computers" back
>then, that did more, and cost far less. They just didn't have the IBM
>logo on them.
>about any criteria you'd like to pick, frankly the IBM PC *stank*.
>
>Its advantage was the NAME on the box.
>Period. No followup.
>But that was more than enough.
Nicely noted Frank.
I can't wait until you guys get to the PC Jr.
8^)
--
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
> OK ... I'll grant you that a proper (and large) sales force had a lot of
> weight.
in the correct market place. in the past decade we had some dealing with
a large manufactoring of consumer products that had developed a consumer
device that is normally handled by transit operations. while they had
extensive sales channels in the consumer market place ... they had no
sales channels in industrial and commercial market segment ... and so
signed an exclusive agreement for the product with a corporation that
concentrates on product sales into the industry and commercial market
segment.
I don't have direct information about the size of the us sales force at
the time ... however ...
after the 23jun69 unbundling announcement, there was some datacenters
put in place for HONE ... hands-on network experience ... targeted at
providing SEs (system engineers, aka technical field people) with
remote-access, hands-on operating system experience running in cp67
virtual machines. Part of 23jun69 annoucement included charging for SE
time at customers (previously groups at SEs at customer shops could help
maintain their technical skills by working freely side-by-side with the
customer technical people; after 23jun69, those opportunities were
significantly reduced). misc. posts mentioning 23jun69 unbundling
announcement (which also included starting to license/charge for
application software)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#unbundle
However, relatively early, they also started to offer software
applications as sales/marketing AIDS (mostly implemented in cms\apl)
... and that online, interactive use began to dominate and take-over the
HONE service. During the early 70s, clones of the US HONE datacenters
started to crop up all over the world (i even got to handle some of the
installations) providing online, interactive timesharing services to
branch office sales and marketing. At some point in the early/mid 70s, a
mainframe order couldn't even be submitted unless it had been first run
through a "HONE" configurator.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hone
In the Mid-70s all the US HONE datacenters were concentrated in silicon
valley (by which time, HONE had also converted from cp67 timesharing to
vm370 timesharing and from cms\apl to apl\cms) ... not too far from
TYMSHARE ... a commerical VM370-based interactive timesharing service
(although the HONE vm370 timesharing complex was possibly 5-10 times
larger than the TYMSHARE vm370 timesharing complex).
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#timeshare
In any case, one of my hobbies was providing a lot of custom system
development and support for the HONE timesharing systems. about the
time of the ibm/pc announcement, there was close to 40k defined (US)
HONE userids for the US branch office sales and marketing people
(although typically there might be only a couple thousand logged on at
any one time). I don't have any real idea about the possible aggregate
number of HONE timesharing userids defined across all the HONE (clones)
around the world.
recent reference to jokes about working 4shift weeks, 1st shift in
bldg. 28 (research) , 2nd shift in bldgs. 14&15 (disk engineering and
product test), 3rd shift in bldg90 (STL, dbms and language products),
and 4th shift (weekends) at HONE.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#55 Capacity and Relational Database
recent posts in a similar PC thread:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#3 The Genealogy of the IBM PC
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#4 The Genealogy of the IBM PC
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#9 The Genealogy of the IBM PC
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#15 The Genealogy of the IBM PC
previous posts in this thread:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#42 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#44 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#45 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#48 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#50 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
Frank McCoy
I dunno ... For the PC Jr., "stank" isn't quite adequate.
The PC at least would work. It was just overpriced, underpowered, with
lousy graphics, awkward to use, and a pain to set up. But, as a
computer, it *was* usable ... to an extent. Especially once they
upgraded to the XT. The PC Jr. however ....
It's a bloody wonder IBM sold *any* of those things.
I'm not quite sure what market they were aiming at ... if any.
Yes, there WERE far worse machines. I have an old Sinclair out in the
garage ....
Still, saying there are worse items that will do the same job, isn't
exactly a strong selling point, is it?
Tris Orendorff
news:actd73t1ri2r08l4n...@4ax.com:
> Its advantage was the NAME on the box.
> Period. No followup.
> But that was more than enough.
Sorry, but I disagree. The original IBM PC came with schematics for the motherboard, keyboard and
videocards. Before long there were inexpensive clones, some equipment was better than IBM (think
Hercules) and more expensive portables too (think Compaq).
Within two years the hardware was everywhere and you could make a small fortune writing a utility to fill
functional gaps in the system.
--
Tris Orendorff
[Q: What kind of modem did Jimi Hendrix use?
A: A purple Hayes.]
ArarghMai...@not.at.arargh.com
wrote:
>In alt.folklore.computers eug...@cse.ucsc.edu (Eugene Miya) wrote:
<snip>
>>I can't wait until you guys get to the PC Jr.
>>8^)
>
>I dunno ... For the PC Jr., "stank" isn't quite adequate.
FPOS comes to mind. :-)
btw, 'PO' stands for 'piece of' :-)
<snip>
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Frank McCoy
>On Tue, 19 Jun 2007 18:43:25 -0500, Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com>
>wrote:
>
>>In alt.folklore.computers eug...@cse.ucsc.edu (Eugene Miya) wrote:
><snip>
>>>I can't wait until you guys get to the PC Jr.
>>>8^)
>>
>>I dunno ... For the PC Jr., "stank" isn't quite adequate.
>
>FPOS comes to mind. :-)
>
>btw, 'PO' stands for 'piece of' :-)
>
Yeah ... That about does describe the thing.
;-{
Frank McCoy
wrote:
>Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com> burped up warm pablum in
>news:actd73t1ri2r08l4n...@4ax.com:
>
>> Its advantage was the NAME on the box.
>> Period. No followup.
>> But that was more than enough.
>
>Sorry, but I disagree. The original IBM PC came with schematics for the motherboard, keyboard and
>videocards. Before long there were inexpensive clones, some equipment was better than IBM (think
>Hercules) and more expensive portables too (think Compaq).
>Within two years the hardware was everywhere and you could make a small fortune writing a utility to fill
>functional gaps in the system.
But there were *better* systems available when it came out, cheaper, and
with even more open specifications. That you *had* to fill the gaps was
part of the problem. It did make a market that other systems just
didn't need.
Peter Flass
> I dunno ... For the PC Jr., "stank" isn't quite adequate.
> The PC at least would work. It was just overpriced, underpowered, with
> lousy graphics, awkward to use, and a pain to set up. But, as a
> computer, it *was* usable ... to an extent. Especially once they
> upgraded to the XT. The PC Jr. however ....
> It's a bloody wonder IBM sold *any* of those things.
> I'm not quite sure what market they were aiming at ... if any.
From my recollection, although there were lots of other machines out
there, they weren't widely used anyplace I have had experience with. I
subscribed to Byte, so I was familiar with these syetems and what they
could do, but never saw one.
Until the PC came out, most people equated "business pc" with "Apple
][". The other smaller boxes, the Commodores, TI's, etc were basically
toys and had little business use. Comparing the PC with the Apple was a
no-brainer.
I'm not sure when the Mac was first introduced, but we had one guy at
work who had one of the original Macs, enhanced with an external hard
disk. I remember thinking it was cute, but underpowered compared to the
PC, and overpriced. If the Mac had come out sooner with more memory and
a lower price, I think it would have captured the market.
Frank McCoy
>I'm not sure when the Mac was first introduced, but we had one guy at
>work who had one of the original Macs, enhanced with an external hard
>disk. I remember thinking it was cute, but underpowered compared to the
>PC, and overpriced. If the Mac had come out sooner with more memory and
>a lower price, I think it would have captured the market.
The Apple ][ was a nice integrated machine ... for the price, in my
opinion. It was a bit short on memory for the large programs just
starting to come out at the time. In my opinion though, it's biggest
problem was caused by the integrated design: Damned little in the way of
expandability, if any. Trying to add more memory, peripherals not
supplied by Mac, etc., just wasn't something most people were up to.
In that, compared to most of the competition of the times like S-100 bus
based machines and yes, even the PC, it sucked. But it was that very
integration that allowed the machine to compete in price and performance
for the time it came out.
In fact, for a while, it seemed the Apple ][ would swamp the IBM shit
because it *did* give far more in price/performance. For a while,
almost every "personal" computer in a school was an Apple ][. They just
needed a decent upgrade path; but never achieved it.
MY recollection of the first really decent Mac I saw (A Lisa, I think),
was, "What wonderful Graphics (though only Black and White),", and how
great it was for word-processing. Apple had WYSIWYG down GREAT for
writing letters, long before Micro$hit claimed it for Word.
In fact, I thought it was a *wonderful* machine; and drooled over the
idea of having one of my own.
Then I saw the price, shuddered, and quickly came back to reality.
A couple of years later I saw a Macintosh at a fraction of the price;
but once again it was WAY out of my budget.
Howard Brazee
wrote:
>Then I saw the price, shuddered, and quickly came back to reality.
>A couple of years later I saw a Macintosh at a fraction of the price;
>but once again it was WAY out of my budget.
Recently there have been a series of articles on the Web comparing the
"real" costs of Windows and Macintosh machines. These can be
similar to arguments we make comparing the "real" costs of mainframes
vs server farms.
Roland Hutchinson
> I'm not sure when the Mac was first introduced,
1984. It was "why 1984 won't be like 1984" -- remember the commercial?
--
Roland Hutchinson Will play viola da gamba for food.
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remove spam. If your message looks like spam I may not see it.
Stan Barr
>
>I'm not sure when the Mac was first introduced,
January 24 1984. Lisa was available a year earlier, but that cost 10 grand
up.
--
Cheers,
Stan Barr stanb .at. dial .dot. pipex .dot. com
(Remove any digits from the addresses when mailing me.)
The future was never like this!
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
Peter Flass <Peter...@Yahoo.com> writes:
> Until the PC came out, most people equated "business pc" with "Apple
> ][". The other smaller boxes, the Commodores, TI's, etc were
> basically toys and had little business use. Comparing the PC with the
> Apple was a no-brainer.
>
> I'm not sure when the Mac was first introduced, but we had one guy at
> work who had one of the original Macs, enhanced with an external hard
> disk. I remember thinking it was cute, but underpowered compared to
> the PC, and overpriced. If the Mac had come out sooner with more
> memory and a lower price, I think it would have captured the market.
my brother was apple regional marketing rep (something about having the
largest "physical" region in continental US). i had the "terminal
emulation" discussion at business dinners with some of the Mac
developers (before mac was announced), when he came into town. The mac
developers appeared to be strongly opposed to the mac being used for
business purposes (i.e target was the home kitchen table).
there was also something about getting dialup access into corporate
hdqtrs s/38 (later as/400) to check on shipping schedules.
the consumer market segment was still limited ... with price still
being market inhibitor ... and the whole game culture was just getting
going. one-at-a-time in business market segment is hard to generate
volumes. the terminal emulation market could have orders of hundreds and
thousands at a time (so it was much easier to reach install base of
large millions).
for little drift, market share, total sales, etc
http://www.wowdailynews.com/pegasus/total_share.html
and related article
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/total-share.ars
Eugene Miya
>>>then, that did more, and cost far less. They just didn't have the IBM
>>>logo on them.
>>>Its advantage was the NAME on the box.
>>>Period. No followup.
>>>But that was more than enough.
>>Nicely noted Frank.
>>I can't wait until you guys get to the PC Jr.
In article <j5qg73hmu9ehuc1g6...@4ax.com>,
Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com> wrote:
>I dunno ... For the PC Jr., "stank" isn't quite adequate.
8^)
>The PC at least would work. It was just overpriced, underpowered, with
>lousy graphics, awkward to use, and a pain to set up. But, as a
>computer, it *was* usable ... to an extent. Especially once they
>upgraded to the XT. The PC Jr. however ....
>It's a bloody wonder IBM sold *any* of those things.
>I'm not quite sure what market they were aiming at ... if any.
The Home.
Few believes in Home Computing back then.
That's why the PC was called the PC and not HC. It was still for business.
I never had to use the Jr. And they were looking for "paths".
The chicklets keyboard has to be experienced.
All kinds of old IBM hardware has to be remembered for history:
the Series 1, the Displaywriter, the Selectric, even their copiers
("Do not use the word Xerox around here").
>Yes, there WERE far worse machines. I have an old Sinclair out in the
>garage ....
>Still, saying there are worse items that will do the same job, isn't
>exactly a strong selling point, is it?
History pieces. Lessons for a small few.
Plus all the 8080 boxes out there which preceded all thise stuff.
--
Frank McCoy
In rebuttal: *Some* of those 8080 boxes worked pretty good.
I know mine did.
Of course, I had a lot more peripherals than most.
I also wrote *all* of the software for the thing from scratch; starting
with toggling mini programs in through the front-panel switches.
(All of the software from the manufacturer that was originally
*supposed* to go on the machine turned out to be "vaporware*.)
There was a *lot* of vaporware in those days.
I think that's when the term got invented.
;-{
Micheal H. McCabe
news:skfi739dkade5d86r...@4ax.com...
> The Apple ][ was a nice integrated machine ... for the price, in my
> opinion. It was a bit short on memory for the large programs just
> starting to come out at the time. In my opinion though, it's biggest
> problem was caused by the integrated design: Damned little in the way of
> expandability, if any. Trying to add more memory, peripherals not
> supplied by Mac, etc., just wasn't something most people were up to.
I'll agree with the "short on memory" part. 48k RAM + 16k ROM was very
tight, assuming you had the maximum memory installed (prior to the //e.) But
in terms of performance, the Apple II was way ahead of the Macintosh until
sometime in the early 1990's. It didn't have a overhead associated with the
Macintosh GUI, so it excelled at spreadsheets, word-processing, and small
database applications.
I'm not sure I'd call the original design "integrated" -- at least until the
//c came out. The original II, II+, and //e were pretty much wide open as
far as expansion. I'm willing to bet that the slots in the Apple II were
the inspiration for the same feature in the IBM-PC. I'll admit that
plugging in a few DIP chips and changing a jumper (in the original II) was
probably beyond the casual user when it came time to add memory, but adding
peripherals was a breeze...
The ones I put together at school had either the 16k "Language Card" or a
Z-80 Coprocessor Card (for running CP/M applications) in Slot Zero. Slot
one got the parallel printer interface and an Epson MX-80 printer. Two was
left open for future expansion. Three had either a Hayes Micromodem II or
super serial card. Four and five were empty and available for future use.
Slot six got the Disk II controller. Slot seven was initially empty but
later got either the Applied Engineering hard drive or (for the VIP systems,
an Apple Profile.) In other systems I used and maintained were graphics
tablets, pen plotters, add-on 80 column video, video overlay systems, even a
Laserdisk control system.
The 256 bytes of ROM space given to each peripheral slot allowed enough room
for a "bootstrap loader" and short peripheral service routines, so most
devices really were "plug and play" -- 20 years before the concept was
brought to Windows.
Apple II users got used to the idea that you could buy an expansion card,
plug it in, and have it work -- without the need to locate pesky OEM driver
software. Chances are it was already installed on the card.
The //c was "cute" and the //gs gave us 16-bits, but it was clear that Apple
was no longer interested in selling "open" systems.
--
Micheal H. McCabe
mhmc...@alltel.net
CBFalconer
>
... snip ...
>
> In rebuttal: *Some* of those 8080 boxes worked pretty good.
> I know mine did.
>
> Of course, I had a lot more peripherals than most. I also wrote
> *all* of the software for the thing from scratch; starting with
> toggling mini programs in through the front-panel switches.
>
> (All of the software from the manufacturer that was originally
> *supposed* to go on the machine turned out to be "vaporware*.)
Sounds like we had similar paths. My systems had lots of
peripherals, but only a few interface cards, which were built for
generality. There was no software available, not even vaporware,
when I started. My systems were usually embedded, and programmed
in Pascal (which required me to write the compiler, assembler,
linker, etc. etc.) All worked fine. ISO standard Pascal.
I was at Yale School of Medicine, Clinical Laboratories. Where
were you?
--
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<http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/423>
<http://www.aaxnet.com/editor/edit043.html>
cbfalconer at maineline dot net
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
CBFalconer
>
... snip ...
>
> my opinion. It was a bit short on memory for the large programs
> just starting to come out at the time. In my opinion though,
> it's biggest problem was caused by the integrated design: Damned
> little in the way of expandability, if any. Trying to add more
> memory, peripherals not supplied by Mac, etc., just wasn't
> something most people were up to.
AFAIAC its major problem was architecture. You can do something
about memory, but you had to look at the heart as either a machine
with almost no registers, or as one with 256 1 byte registers
tucked away in page zero. Also a seriously limited stack. I much
preferred the 8080/z80 organization.
Frank McCoy
>Frank McCoy wrote:
>>
>... snip ...
>>
>> The Apple ][ was a nice integrated machine ... for the price, in
>> my opinion. It was a bit short on memory for the large programs
>> just starting to come out at the time. In my opinion though,
>> it's biggest problem was caused by the integrated design: Damned
>> little in the way of expandability, if any. Trying to add more
>> memory, peripherals not supplied by Mac, etc., just wasn't
>> something most people were up to.
>
>AFAIAC its major problem was architecture. You can do something
>about memory, but you had to look at the heart as either a machine
>with almost no registers, or as one with 256 1 byte registers
>tucked away in page zero. Also a seriously limited stack. I much
>preferred the 8080/z80 organization.
>
Well, for *architecture*, I think the 6800 had both 8080/Z-80 and the
6502 beat all hollow.
Frank McCoy
>Frank McCoy wrote:
>>
>... snip ...
>>
>> In rebuttal: *Some* of those 8080 boxes worked pretty good.
>> I know mine did.
>>
>> Of course, I had a lot more peripherals than most. I also wrote
>> *all* of the software for the thing from scratch; starting with
>> toggling mini programs in through the front-panel switches.
>>
>> (All of the software from the manufacturer that was originally
>> *supposed* to go on the machine turned out to be "vaporware*.)
>
>Sounds like we had similar paths. My systems had lots of
>peripherals, but only a few interface cards, which were built for
>generality. There was no software available, not even vaporware,
>when I started. My systems were usually embedded, and programmed
>in Pascal (which required me to write the compiler, assembler,
>linker, etc. etc.) All worked fine. ISO standard Pascal.
>
>I was at Yale School of Medicine, Clinical Laboratories. Where
>were you?
>
Out in California; working as Chief Engineer and R&D engineer for a
music company. I talked the owners into buying a computer to handle a
database, notification, and shipping ... And when the expected software
didn't arrive, guess who had to write the programs to handle said data?
That's how I got into programming: The HARD way. The only "instruction
manual" I had was a listing of the 8080 instruction-set, the
construction manuals for the computer and I/O boards, and some printed
programs I bought for a crude 8008 assembler and editor. VERY crude.
(Well, the 8008 was a very crude processor; but the instructions mapped
one-for-one with the 8080; so it gave me a start.)
The very first "program" I wrote was a cassette save utility, so I
didn't have to keep toggling in code through the front-panel every time.
The second was a "monitor" program that allowed me to enter data through
the "glass teletype" I built. The third was to add a debugger and
breakpoints to the monitor. Etc. I bootstrapped my way up until I
could enter the assembler and editor; then used those in day-by-day
improvements to each until I had fairly decent tools. The editor
eventually morphed into becoming the data-entry program and tools for
printing said data for the originally desired purpose ... once I got the
disk drives operating and a (very) crude OS to save and recover data on.
Concurrent with that, when the system was about 3/4 complete, I
collaborated with Gary Shannon working at the Computer Store in Santa
Monica on producing VTL-2. Previously he had hand-assembled VTL-1 in a
very painful way similar to my toggling in bits on the 8080. I
suggested a quick improvement that would greatly increase the ability of
the program, he suggested a second, based on mine; and within a day we
were pounding out upgrade after upgrade. To make the job easier, one
night I ripped out the 8080 codes from my assembler and stuffed in 6800
codes to make a cross-assembler that produced output that a 680B could
use as input. Then things went even faster and we got even more "cute"
with the space saved by using a real assembler. Eventually we got so
that we just couldn't stuff any more functions in the 768 bytes of ROM,
so we released it as VTL-2. Over 2000 copies sold worldwide; and never
a bug report.
In the meantime I continued improving the OS and data-entry programs,
until the company decided perhaps buying a complete integrated system
from a "real" computer company might be better; even though it would
cost about five to ten times as much. I guess I was taking too long to
get the extra functions in; because all of my work on the computer was
pretty much done at night in my so-called "spare time". During the day
I had my "real job" of design work in the Electronics Department ...
about a 50/50 mix of correcting old problems mis-designed by people
before I got there, and new designs for new products or upgrades for old
ones.
Did that until the wife and I moved from California to Minnesota; where
I ended up primarily in programming instead of circuit design. (I could
have worked in either; my choice.)
Not exactly the method I'd recommend to anybody else as a way to learn
programming. However, it *did* give me deep insight into tools that
most people just take for granted. Writing an emulator for the Mostek
Z-80 Development System gave me an even deeper appreciation for how a
microprocessor worked; when I thought I already knew most of what there
was to know about the 8080/Z-80. There I learned not just WHAT the
instructions did, but WHY they did them in that fashion.
Steve O'Hara-Smith
The 6809 was the nicest of all the 8 bit architectures by far.
Joe Pfeiffer
> Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com> wrote:
> > >
> > Well, for *architecture*, I think the 6800 had both 8080/Z-80 and the
> > 6502 beat all hollow.
>
> The 6809 was the nicest of all the 8 bit architectures by far.
We still use the HC11 (same family) in our sophomore assembly language
programming class.
Frank McCoy
>On Thu, 21 Jun 2007 09:30:27 -0500
>Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com> wrote:
>
>> In alt.folklore.computers CBFalconer <cbfal...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> >AFAIAC its major problem was architecture. You can do something
>> >about memory, but you had to look at the heart as either a machine
>> >with almost no registers, or as one with 256 1 byte registers
>> >tucked away in page zero. Also a seriously limited stack. I much
>> >preferred the 8080/z80 organization.
>> >
>> Well, for *architecture*, I think the 6800 had both 8080/Z-80 and the
>> 6502 beat all hollow.
>
> The 6809 was the nicest of all the 8 bit architectures by far.
Probably ... Sadly, it didn't get nearly as much use as its smaller
cousin the 6800. About the last of the "true" microprocessors not
running microcode emulation of a larger instruction-set; running
"native" instead.
Robert
"Steve O'Hara-Smith" <ste...@eircom.net> wrote in message
news:20070618071914....@eircom.net...
> On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 21:22:24 -0700
> Quadibloc <jsa...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>
> > Microsoft Windows dominates the world today for the same reason - it's
> > the _de facto_ standard for which you have the best chance of getting
> > software. But it only became a success in the beginning because it
> > *did* offer value; if you already had a PC, it was cheaper to spend
> > about $100 on a program than to run out and buy a whole new computer
> > (i.e., a Macintosh) to have a graphical user interface.
>
> But that's not how Windows got to dominate the market - Windows got
> to dominate the market when Windows 3 started to come bundled on every PC
> you could buy.
>
> C:>WIN | Directable Mirror Arrays
> The computer obeys and wins. | A better way to focus the
sun
> You lose and Bill collects. | licences available see
> | http://www.sohara.org/
Which was illegal and MS lost an antitrust case.
Robert
> In alt.folklore.computers hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
>
> >On Jun 17, 4:19 pm, Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com> wrote:
> >
> >> The IBM PC not only was far from the first; it was VERY far from being
> >> the best for its time. Close to the worst, in fact; especially for the
> >> money. Compared to say the Zenith 100, it was a pile of crap. What it
> >> had going for it, was the IBM logo on the outside of the packing-case;
> >> and nothing else; since damned little of the machine itself was even
> >> made by IBM.
> >
> >Obviously the IBM PC wasn't the first. But putting the IBM label on
> >it helped legitimatize the PC as a business tool instead of a lab
> >curiosity or hobbyist toy.
> >
> >As was traditional with IBM's computers, they offered the PC not only
> >as a piece of hardware, but also with a suite of applications to run
> >with it. Perhaps the early IBM applications (e.g. its "assistant
> >series") weren't as good as independent offerings available on other
> >machines, but they were together as a suite. The large sales volume
> >of the IBM unit encouraged independent developers to create stuff and
> >they did.
> >
> >Throughout its history IBM info-processing products were often more
> >expensive and less technically sophisticated then the competition.
> >But IBM's total systems approach, which included the PC, meant a great
> >deal to business.
> >
> >
> >> However, that seems to have been enough and more-so.
> >> The quote at the time was, "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."
> >
> >For many good reasons in the corporate world. Not that IBM was
> >perfect, but so many of its competitors were so clueless in delivering
> >a * workable and reliable system *.
> >
> >
> >> The IBM PC *did* have on other thing going for it; something IBM later
> >> dearly regretted; but that was a large portion of the key that made the
> >> machine such a success: A fairly open architecture. If it had been
> >> closed, like IBM later wished it had done, then other open
architectures
> >> would likely have squashed it flat. It was the clone market, something
> >> IBM hated, that to a considerable extent made the machine the success
it
> >> was.
> >
> >Certainly the open architecture did exactly what it was supposed to
> >do: encourage external parties to develop hardware and software to
> >sell for the IBM PC to increase its value to customers. Without that,
> >there would've been far fewer sales. I think IBM came out ahead by
> >having it open, despite later losing business to the clones.
> >
> >I think IBM lost the advanced (286 and onward) business since the
> >clones proved to be more nimble and competitve than IBM's top-heavy
> >corporate world was. I understand that IBM's PC was initially
> >developed and marketed by a separate unit, but that unit was later
> >absorbed back into the corporation. I think IBM's biggest mistake was
> >that takeback, had they left the PC unit independent as before it
> >would've done better.
> >
> >
> >I don't know the actual facts on the contract between IBM and
> >Microsoft to produce the first DOS (which MS got from someone else).
> >But maybe IBM should've asked for exclusive rights to it, back then MS
> >probably would've agreed to it.
>
> They *thought* they had.
> MicroSoft disagreed.
> *HUGE* lawsuit over that.
> MicroSoft won.
>
> _____
> / ' / T
> ,-/-, __ __. ____ /_
> (_/ / (_(_/|_/ / <_/ <_
I don't remember any lawsuit. What ia your information source?
Steve O'Hara-Smith
"Robert" <sab...@comcast.net> wrote:
> "Steve O'Hara-Smith" <ste...@eircom.net> wrote in message
> > But that's not how Windows got to dominate the market - Windows got
> > to dominate the market when Windows 3 started to come bundled on every
> > PC you could buy.
> Which was illegal and MS lost an antitrust case.
Far too late to do any good.
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com> wrote:
> In alt.folklore.computers Steve O'Hara-Smith <ste...@eircom.net> wrote:
>
> > The 6809 was the nicest of all the 8 bit architectures by far.
>
> Probably ... Sadly, it didn't get nearly as much use as its smaller
> cousin the 6800. About the last of the "true" microprocessors not
Sure by the time the 6809 was available Motorola were already
announcing and pushing the 68000.
Frank McCoy
>On Thu, 21 Jun 2007 19:40:27 -0700
>"Robert" <sab...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> "Steve O'Hara-Smith" <ste...@eircom.net> wrote in message
>
>> > But that's not how Windows got to dominate the market - Windows got
>> > to dominate the market when Windows 3 started to come bundled on every
>> > PC you could buy.
>
>> Which was illegal and MS lost an antitrust case.
>
> Far too late to do any good.
Worse than that, they didn't even get a slap on the wrist for it.
Not even a $10 fine.
Just told, "Don't do that any more."
Geesh.
--
_____
/ ' / ™
Frank McCoy
>I don't remember any lawsuit. What ia your information source?
>
I remember hearing about it at the time.
I think reading about it in the trade papers.
--
_____
/ ' / ™
John Savard
wrote, in part:
>Like I said, there were other, far BETTER "Personal Computers" back
>then, that did more, and cost far less. They just didn't have the IBM
>logo on them. The IBM PC didn't even have the advantage of being made
>at IBM. All it *did* really have was the logo on the box as an
>advantage over the competition ... computer OR terminal-emulator.
>
>But that sigil on the cardboard container was more than enough.
>
>When compared with machines already on the market, like the Zenith-100,
>in price, performance, graphics ability, clarity, ease-of-use, ease of
>setup, ruggedness, MTBF, size, compatibility with existing software, or
>about any criteria you'd like to pick, frankly the IBM PC *stank*.
Most of the computers out there that anyone had heard of in the same
price class as the IBM PC were Z-80 based CP/M machines. The IBM PC cost
more than they did, but it had the ability to have its memory expanded.
Most 16-bit machines then cost around $5,000, which was considerably
more than the price of an IBM PC.
But it is true that the IBM name on the box was a big advantage. Because
that name meant that there were good prospects of as wide a selection of
software being available for the IBM PC as already existed for the Apple
II and for the major CP/M systems (such as the Kaypro II).
It is a pity that neither the Atari ST nor the Commodore Amiga managed
to survive as a viable alternative, but they essentially fell off the
radar screen even before Motorola abandoned the 68k architecture, which
was a near-fatal blow that the Macintosh managed to survive. The
prospect of lawsuits by Apple was one factor that helped strangle both
the ST and the Amiga; it wasn't any dark doings on the part of IBM or
even Microsoft that played a role.
When people say "the name on the box" made a computer a success, it
seems to me that they're trying to claim that consumers are a bunch of
stupid sheep. It may be frustrating that the big players have a market
advantage that is hard to dislodge, but people weren't buying computers
because they thought the brand name automatically conferred quality.
Although the IBM PC was more solidly built than some other machines of
the time period. Instead, they favored the computer with the IBM name on
it because of a perfectly rational criterion that related to genuine
value: *the prospect of software availability*.
John Savard
http://www.quadibloc.com/index.html
winston...@yahoo.com
wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 16:24:20 -0500, Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com>
> wrote, in part:
>
> >Like I said, there were other, far BETTER "Personal Computers" back
> >then, that did more, and cost far less. They just didn't have the IBM
> >logo on them. The IBM PC didn't even have the advantage of being made
> >at IBM. All it *did* really have was the logo on the box as an
> >advantage over the competition ... computer OR terminal-emulator.
>
> >But that sigil on the cardboard container was more than enough.
>
> >When compared with machines already on the market, like the Zenith-100,
> >in price, performance, graphics ability, clarity, ease-of-use, ease of
> >setup, ruggedness, MTBF, size, compatibility with existing software, or
> >about any criteria you'd like to pick, frankly the IBM PC *stank*.
>
> Most of the computers out there that anyone had heard of in the same
> price class as the IBM PC were Z-80 based CP/M machines. The IBM PC cost
> more than they did, but it had the ability to have its memory expanded.
>
> Most 16-bit machines then cost around $5,000, which was considerably
> more than the price of an IBM PC.
The TI-99, 16-bit, cost around $550 back in 1981. $300 by '82. Just a
console, perhaps. With 32k, disk drive, RS232 interface, about $1500
total. Still much less than $5k.
>
> But it is true that the IBM name on the box was a big advantage. Because
> that name meant that there were good prospects of as wide a selection of
> software being available for the IBM PC as already existed for the Apple
> II and for the major CP/M systems (such as the Kaypro II).
>
> It is a pity that neither the Atari ST nor the Commodore Amiga managed
> to survive as a viable alternative, but they essentially fell off the
> radar screen even before Motorola abandoned the 68k architecture, which
> was a near-fatal blow that the Macintosh managed to survive. The
> prospect of lawsuits by Apple was one factor that helped strangle both
> the ST and the Amiga; it wasn't any dark doings on the part of IBM or
> even Microsoft that played a role.
>
> When people say "the name on the box" made a computer a success, it
> seems to me that they're trying to claim that consumers are a bunch of
> stupid sheep.
Being too much of an optimist? The fact that Windows is still the
leading OS with consumers pretty much proves it, doesn't it?
Phil Smith III
...phsiii
=========
Cool! Thanks.
My own addition would be in the category of what might be called "business history." By the 1980s IBM was struggling in the mini and super-mini business. IBM had 5 hardware platforms, 9 or 11 operating systems (depending on how you counted), and minimal marketshare. DEC, DG, Wang, etc. were eating IBM's lunch in every market other than where purchases were controlled by the data center. Inside the data center, the large VAXes from Digital and the MV machines from DG were starting to threaten the mainframe crown jewels.
A collaboration of sorts between Boca (engineering) and Atlanta (sales) led to a device called the S/32. This was intended to be a downward extension into the business market for minicomputers, building off the phenomenal success of the Rochester small business line: S/3, S/34, S/36, and S/38. The system came from Boca, outside of Rochester's control, but the sales driver was NMD, Boca and Rochester's sales arm in Atlanta.
That hardware box had all the engineering characteristics of the original PC - 8088 processor, same storage options, 2 floppies - as I remember. However, the software was closed.
Simultaneously, another part of Boca had been experimenting with at least 2 (I saw them), and maybe 3, commercial offerings that were squarely aimed at the PC market.
The Boca PC team was given the go ahead and cannibalized much of the S/32's hardware. They produced a much more capable PC offering than the previous 8-bit offerings.
I believe, unlike many of the comments in the thread, there was a business motive to the IBM PC. It was to attack the minicomputers. The attack was required because IBM's mainframes were being attacked from below by the minis. The correct business strategy was to attack the attackers from below with an even smaller / cheaper system.
Which is the end of the story, boys and girls. For, while so many people focus on how the PC has damaged the mainframe, the mainframe still stands tall. What the PC was meant to destroy, it did destroy - the minis and superminis. DEC went from top of the heap (Queen Elizabeth in Boston harbor for DECWorld) to non-existence in less than 10 years. DG is no more. Wang is no more. The PC destroyed them all.
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
> Which is the end of the story, boys and girls. For, while so many
> people focus on how the PC has damaged the mainframe, the mainframe
> still stands tall. What the PC was meant to destroy, it did destroy -
> the minis and superminis. DEC went from top of the heap (Queen
> Elizabeth in Boston harbor for DECWorld) to non-existence in less than
> 10 years. DG is no more. Wang is no more. The PC destroyed them
> all.
we were spending some time in SCI (as well as FCS and HIPPI) meetings.
both Sequent and DG would build an SCI machine with four (intel)
processor boards ... for 256process numa machine (convex built an sci
machine with two hp/risc processor board ... for 128processor numa
machine). both DG and sequent are gone ... sequent being absorbed by ibm
... and some recent references that the only surviving sequent
technology may be found in some contributions to linux. HP's superdome
may or may not be considered to be the exemplar follow-on. a couple
recent posts on sci/numa machines:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#3 University rank of Computer Architecture
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#13 Is Parallel Programming Just Too Hard?
wang signed a deal with austin (and some of the austin people actually
left and went to work for wang) to use rs/6000 as their hardware
platform (getting out of the hardware business).
in some of the a.f.c. posts, i've frequently pointed out that the late
70s and early 80s saw a significant uptake of mid-range machines in the
departmental server market segment ... both vm/43xx and vax/vms ... with
vm/43xx actually having larger install base than vax/vms (in part
because there were numerous large customer orders for multiple hundred
43xx machines at a time). by the mid-80s that market segment was
starting to be taken over by workstations and large PCs (with
corresponding drop-off in sales of 43xx and vax machines). Later the
more powerful PCs would also take over much of the workstation market.
misc. old email mentioning various happenings around 43xx
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#43xx
there had been anticipation that the introduction of the 4361/4381 would
see compareable uptake to 4331/4341 ... but by then, the market was
already starting to move to workstations and larger PCs.
a couple past posts given domestic and world-wide vax numbers, sliced &
diced by model and yr (post 85, the numbers are primarily micro-vax):
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002f.html#0 Computers in Science Fiction
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2005f.html#37 Where should the type information be: in tags and descriptors
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2006k.html#31 PDP-1
Walter Bushell
Steve O'Hara-Smith <ste...@eircom.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Jun 2007 19:21:54 -0500
> Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com> wrote:
>
> > In alt.folklore.computers Steve O'Hara-Smith <ste...@eircom.net> wrote:
> >
> > > The 6809 was the nicest of all the 8 bit architectures by far.
> >
> > Probably ... Sadly, it didn't get nearly as much use as its smaller
> > cousin the 6800. About the last of the "true" microprocessors not
>
> Sure by the time the 6809 was available Motorola were already
> announcing and pushing the 68000.
Sad but expected the best of a tech genre is delivered when it about to
be replaced by a superior technology.
Shmuel Metz , Seymour J.
at 12:34 PM, Phil Smith III <li...@AKPHS.COM> said:
>That hardware box had all the engineering characteristics of the
>original PC - 8088 processor, same storage options, 2 floppies - as I
>remember. However, the software was closed.
Don't forget DisplayWriter and DataMaster, which used the 8086.
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
Charlie Gibbs
(John Savard) writes:
> It is a pity that neither the Atari ST nor the Commodore Amiga managed
> to survive as a viable alternative, but they essentially fell off
> the radar screen even before Motorola abandoned the 68k architecture,
> which was a near-fatal blow that the Macintosh managed to survive. The
> prospect of lawsuits by Apple was one factor that helped strangle both
> the ST and the Amiga; it wasn't any dark doings on the part of IBM or
> even Microsoft that played a role.
On the other hand, the dark doings on the part of the Commodore brass
was pretty much enough to sink the Amiga.
> When people say "the name on the box" made a computer a success, it
> seems to me that they're trying to claim that consumers are a bunch of
> stupid sheep.
Isn't that why they were renamed from "customers"?
--
/~\ cgi...@kltpzyxm.invalid (Charlie Gibbs)
\ / I'm really at ac.dekanfrus if you read it the right way.
X Top-posted messages will probably be ignored. See RFC1855.
/ \ HTML will DEFINITELY be ignored. Join the ASCII ribbon campaign!
Frank McCoy
Savard) wrote:
>On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 16:24:20 -0500, Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com>
>wrote, in part:
>
>>Like I said, there were other, far BETTER "Personal Computers" back
>>then, that did more, and cost far less. They just didn't have the IBM
>>logo on them. The IBM PC didn't even have the advantage of being made
>>at IBM. All it *did* really have was the logo on the box as an
>>advantage over the competition ... computer OR terminal-emulator.
>>
>>But that sigil on the cardboard container was more than enough.
>>
>>When compared with machines already on the market, like the Zenith-100,
>>in price, performance, graphics ability, clarity, ease-of-use, ease of
>>setup, ruggedness, MTBF, size, compatibility with existing software, or
>>about any criteria you'd like to pick, frankly the IBM PC *stank*.
>
>Most of the computers out there that anyone had heard of in the same
>price class as the IBM PC were Z-80 based CP/M machines. The IBM PC cost
>more than they did, but it had the ability to have its memory expanded.
>
>Most 16-bit machines then cost around $5,000, which was considerably
>more than the price of an IBM PC.
>
As I recall, the Zenith-100, which came out about six months before the
IBM crap, had TWO processors (Z-80 and 8086), Far better graphics than
the IBM shit did until EGA came out, and a nice decent OS that
integrated both processors together. You could actually run both CP/M
and MS-DOS on the machine; though there you didn't have the integration.
As I recall, the price was about the same or slightly LESS than the IBM
PC, which in performance and capability wasn't even in the same league.
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/zenith-100-original/index.html
Perhaps one of the main problems with selling the Zenith machine was
that it was also sold as a Heathkit you could build yourself, as well as
fully-assembled; and thus some people got the idea it was a "toy"
computer.
>But it is true that the IBM name on the box was a big advantage. Because
>that name meant that there were good prospects of as wide a selection of
>software being available for the IBM PC as already existed for the Apple
>II and for the major CP/M systems (such as the Kaypro II).
>
But, at the time, there were other systems with MORE software available,
and better machines too.
>It is a pity that neither the Atari ST nor the Commodore Amiga managed
>to survive as a viable alternative, but they essentially fell off the
>radar screen even before Motorola abandoned the 68k architecture, which
>was a near-fatal blow that the Macintosh managed to survive. The
The Amiga had adherents for YEARS after they stopped making them.
I know of plenty of people who would have been very glad to continue
buying them, even at higher prices, and even after the PC had pretty
much swept the market. I wonder if it was some internal company battle
that killed the Amiga instead of external market forces? That often
happened to a lot of companies that were otherwise successful.
>prospect of lawsuits by Apple was one factor that helped strangle both
>the ST and the Amiga; it wasn't any dark doings on the part of IBM or
>even Microsoft that played a role.
>
>When people say "the name on the box" made a computer a success, it
>seems to me that they're trying to claim that consumers are a bunch of
>stupid sheep.
No ... Chicken, more likely.
Or even more-so, not willing to fight internal Company Politics.
The infighting and backstabbing in many companies is so prevalent that
not taking chances where somebody else can get behind you becomes the
whole game. Thus the often quoted maxim, "Nobody ever got fired for
buying IBM." It wasn't actually *getting fired* people were worried
about; but getting support from higher-up. People didn't worry so much
about being turned down on a request for an IBM machine as they did for
one from a company nobody in their company had ever heard of.
And ... Getting turned down on a departmental request for needed (or
even just useful) computers could pretty much destroy an up-and-coming
young supervisor's chances of advancement. When there *was* an
alternative, even a clunky and overpriced one with a BIG name on the
box, you didn't have to worry about that so much.
It's *NOT* stupidity to pick the lesser, overpriced, underpowered
machine in that case ... It's called, "Covering your ass."
The stupidity is in CORPORATE hidebound philosophy that, in a high-tech,
rapidly evolving market like Personal Computers, encouraged (and still
encourages) buying older stodgy machines from well-known and moribund
companies rather than bleeding-edge, cheaper, faster, and much BETTER
machines from companies without 50 years or more in the electronics
business.
I buy a *FAR* better printer these days from Brother, a company I hadn't
even heard of 15 years ago, than Xerox, HP, or similar companies make.
It has more features, is far more rugged, breaks down less, is FAR
cheaper in toner-usage, is more compatible, etc.. Yet big companies
will far sooner buy an HP, because *IT* has the name. ;-{
Not that there's anything WRONG with HP printers, per-se ... Except
overpriced, not having the features, and costing far more per-page to
print.
Another (Very STUPID IMO) reason people buy IBM, HP, and other old brand
names these days, is because they can get "service contracts" on them.
Sheer IDIOCY, if examined from a price/performance standpoint. Often
I've seen it that a company could buy THREE printers for the price of
ONE HP that they bought a service-contract on. Then you add the price
of a three-year service contract, and you could buy FIVE brand-new
printers at that cost; simply breaking a new one out of a box every six
months or so and tossing the old one for less money ... even if the old
one was working FINE. When they're that (relatively) cheap, buying a
service-contract is STUPID!
But that's corporate philosophy for you; and the people at the bottom
asking for a new printer/computer/terminal/whatever have to live with it
and order accordingly.
No, PEOPLE aren't stupid; but all too often COMPANIES are!
>It may be frustrating that the big players have a market
>advantage that is hard to dislodge, but people weren't buying computers
>because they thought the brand name automatically conferred quality.
>Although the IBM PC was more solidly built than some other machines of
>the time period.
"Some" ... not even most.
Many were FAR more solid than the IBM PC.
The horrid mess of the connectors in the rear alone ....
>Instead, they favored the computer with the IBM name on
>it because of a perfectly rational criterion that related to genuine
>value: *the prospect of software availability*.
>
BULL.
There was far more software available on CP/M at the time than IBM ever
provided. OTHER companies soon started supplying, once the market was
there; but not when the PC came out.
No, the reason was corporate "standards" as explained above.
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
> BULL.
> There was far more software available on CP/M at the time than IBM ever
> provided. OTHER companies soon started supplying, once the market was
> there; but not when the PC came out.
>
> No, the reason was corporate "standards" as explained above.
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#50 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
and/or corporate marketing ... majority of the people in the period ...
didn't understand what personal computing and/or PC software actually
met ... marketing such abstractions would have little meaning
(sufficient understanding of how they might actually benefit). 3270
terminals to the mainframe did have some meaning ... and terminal
emulation, effectively same price, same footprint ... with the addition
of something more than 3270 terminal emulation ... even if the vast
majority of people had no idea what that actually added value really met
(but it wasn't a risk/justification issue ... the cost/justification was
covered by its play as added value 3270 terminal replacement).
it didn't have to be a "standard" as something officially proclaimed
... although it could be an implicit standard ... in that terminal
emulation was something that the vast majority of the people could
relate to and believe they could understand.
this previous post
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#63 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
with this reference on personal computer market share,
1975-2004:
http://www.wowdailynews.com/pegasus/total_share.html
shows TRS-80 with the earliest annual volumes of few hundred thousand
... then later atari 400/800, and eventually the apple II in the
80s. the closest to the pc in volumes was the commodore 64 in 83/84 with
millions ... but they weren't selling into the terminal emulation market
... and that really shifted by 85/86 (commodore 64 stayed in there with
2.5m/annum in 84, 85, & 86 ... while the pc+clones continued to
significantly increase).
Howard Brazee
wrote:
>and/or corporate marketing ... majority of the people in the period ...
>didn't understand what personal computing and/or PC software actually
>met ... marketing such abstractions would have little meaning
>(sufficient understanding of how they might actually benefit). 3270
>terminals to the mainframe did have some meaning ... and terminal
>emulation, effectively same price, same footprint ... with the addition
>of something more than 3270 terminal emulation ... even if the vast
>majority of people had no idea what that actually added value really met
>(but it wasn't a risk/justification issue ... the cost/justification was
>covered by its play as added value 3270 terminal replacement).
And someone buys a computer to play the latest game - and wonders what
the heck the SysRq key does.
Dan Espen
> On Fri, 22 Jun 2007 14:03:05 -0600, in bit.listserv.ibm-main you
> wrote:
>
>>and/or corporate marketing ... majority of the people in the period ...
>>didn't understand what personal computing and/or PC software actually
>>met ... marketing such abstractions would have little meaning
>>(sufficient understanding of how they might actually benefit). 3270
>>terminals to the mainframe did have some meaning ... and terminal
>>emulation, effectively same price, same footprint ... with the addition
>>of something more than 3270 terminal emulation ... even if the vast
>>majority of people had no idea what that actually added value really met
>>(but it wasn't a risk/justification issue ... the cost/justification was
>>covered by its play as added value 3270 terminal replacement).
>
> And someone buys a computer to play the latest game - and wonders what
> the heck the SysRq key does.
Or they wonder where the hell the Attention key is.
Screw up no matter how you look at it.
Peter Flass
It doesn't really matter, they're becoming increasingly irrelevant.
They're the walking dead, and just haven't realized it yet.
Charlie Gibbs
mcc...@millcomm.com (Frank McCoy) writes:
> In alt.folklore.computers jsa...@excxn.aNOSPAMb.cdn.invalid
> (John Savard) wrote:
>
>> It is a pity that neither the Atari ST nor the Commodore Amiga
>> managed to survive as a viable alternative, but they essentially
>> fell off the radar screen even before Motorola abandoned the
>> 68k architecture, which was a near-fatal blow that the Macintosh
>> managed to survive. The
>
> The Amiga had adherents for YEARS after they stopped making them.
> I know of plenty of people who would have been very glad to continue
> buying them, even at higher prices, and even after the PC had pretty
> much swept the market. I wonder if it was some internal company
> battle that killed the Amiga instead of external market forces?
> That often happened to a lot of companies that were otherwise
> successful.
It was once said that if Commodore made sushi, they'd market it as
"cold dead fish". There were many bad management decisions that
killed the Amiga - but that didn't stop the president and chairman
from pulling down $1.75M salaries. The grunts that actually did the
magic created a video entitled "The Deathbed Vigil: Tales of Digital
Angst", which documents Commodore's final days (plus the wild
cathartic party afterwards). It was a sad moment in computing
history. (BTW I'm posting this from an Amiga.)
>> When people say "the name on the box" made a computer a success, it
>> seems to me that they're trying to claim that consumers are a bunch
>> of stupid sheep.
>
> No ... Chicken, more likely.
I like the sheep analogy because they're herded and regularly fleeced.
Frank McCoy
wrote:
But ... Sheep are so much *smarter* than chickens.
There's probably no living creature more complicated than a worm that's
as dumb as a modern farm chicken ... Well, perhaps excepting turkeys.
Robert
"Peter Flass" <Peter...@Yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:467c497d$0$24753$4c36...@roadrunner.com...
underground parking lot in the U.S. Parks 5,000 cars and is 4 football
fields long. They are spending $1.3 billion on campus expansion.
Robert
Robert
Peter Flass
That's one of the indicators. A red dwarf expands suddenly just before
it implodes.
CBFalconer
>
... snip ...
>
> I buy a *FAR* better printer these days from Brother, a company I
> hadn't even heard of 15 years ago, than Xerox, HP, or similar
> companies make. It has more features, is far more rugged, breaks
> down less, is FAR cheaper in toner-usage, is more compatible, etc..
> Yet big companies will far sooner buy an HP, because *IT* has the
> name. ;-{
We (at Yale School of Medicine) bought many of the first Epson RX70
printers when they first appeared. They ended our dependance on
short-lived scruffy ugly beasts.
--
<http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt>
<http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/423>
<http://www.aaxnet.com/editor/edit043.html>
cbfalconer at maineline dot net
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
Steve O'Hara-Smith
jsa...@excxn.aNOSPAMb.cdn.invalid (John Savard) wrote:
> Instead, they favored the computer with the IBM name on
> it because of a perfectly rational criterion that related to genuine
> value: *the prospect of software availability*.
Most of the CP/M and MP/M buyers used WordStar and custom or
specialist software. When we were selling MP/M networks into places and
getting asked why don't we use the IBM AT (yes AT not PC) since that was so
much more powerful and had so much software available we had to point out
that an AT with PC-DOS was a single user system and they couldn't hook
terminals to it like they were used to doing. The response was usually
disbelief that turned into incredulity when they checked and found we
weren't spinning them a line.
Eventually most of those customers went XENIX and then added
networked PCs.
The later adopters never realised they had missed out on multi-user
capabilities until Novell came into their lives.
CBFalconer
>
... snip ...
>
> probably no living creature more complicated than a worm that's
> as dumb as a modern farm chicken ... Well, perhaps excepting
> turkeys.
But turkeys survive quite nicely in the wild. Not chickens.
Joe Pfeiffer
> In article <5p4o735lt9skc2505...@4ax.com>,
> mcc...@millcomm.com (Frank McCoy) writes:
> >
> > The Amiga had adherents for YEARS after they stopped making them.
> > I know of plenty of people who would have been very glad to continue
> > buying them, even at higher prices, and even after the PC had pretty
> > much swept the market. I wonder if it was some internal company
> > battle that killed the Amiga instead of external market forces?
> > That often happened to a lot of companies that were otherwise
> > successful.
Oh, lord. The extent to which Commodore squandered a market is just
impossible to conceive of. The Amiga was a near-perfect mix of a nice
multitasking OS with ready access to the hardware. If there were
still Amigas, I probably wouldn't ever have started using Linux.
> It was once said that if Commodore made sushi, they'd market it as
> "cold dead fish". There were many bad management decisions that
Another one I remember is the comment that they couldn't sell winter
coats to Eskimos.
> killed the Amiga - but that didn't stop the president and chairman
> from pulling down $1.75M salaries. The grunts that actually did the
There was some brief discussion of a shareholders' suit against the
corporate officers.
> magic created a video entitled "The Deathbed Vigil: Tales of Digital
> Angst", which documents Commodore's final days (plus the wild
> cathartic party afterwards). It was a sad moment in computing
> history. (BTW I'm posting this from an Amiga.)
I'd *love* to see that video.
> >> When people say "the name on the box" made a computer a success, it
> >> seems to me that they're trying to claim that consumers are a bunch
> >> of stupid sheep.
> >
> > No ... Chicken, more likely.
>
> I like the sheep analogy because they're herded and regularly fleeced.
As the old saying went, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"
Joe Pfeiffer
> Frank McCoy wrote:
> >
> ... snip ...
> >
> > But ... Sheep are so much *smarter* than chickens. There's
> > probably no living creature more complicated than a worm that's
> > as dumb as a modern farm chicken ... Well, perhaps excepting
> > turkeys.
>
> But turkeys survive quite nicely in the wild. Not chickens.
Not the modern domesticated turkey. Wild turkeys are a whole 'nother
bird.
Joe Pfeiffer
> "Peter Flass" <Peter...@Yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:467c497d$0$24753$4c36...@roadrunner.com...
> >
> > It doesn't really matter, they're becoming increasingly irrelevant.
> > They're the walking dead, and just haven't realized it yet.
> >
> Not if you measure by employees. They are just starting to build the largest
> underground parking lot in the U.S. Parks 5,000 cars and is 4 football
> fields long. They are spending $1.3 billion on campus expansion.
That may be evidence right there.
Charles Richmond
> Steve O'Hara-Smith <ste...@eircom.net> writes:
>> Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com> wrote:
>>> Well, for *architecture*, I think the 6800 had both 8080/Z-80 and the
>>> 6502 beat all hollow.
>> The 6809 was the nicest of all the 8 bit architectures by far.
>
> programming class.
The Motorola HC11 is a pretty good processor, but Motorola
dropped some of the interesting instructions from the 6809
to create the HC11. I guess they needed the silicon for
the A-to-D's and other built-in peripherals... but *I* was
disappointed...
--
+----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Charles and Francis Richmond richmond at plano dot net |
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Frank McCoy
>Frank McCoy wrote:
>>
>... snip ...
>>
>> But ... Sheep are so much *smarter* than chickens. There's
>> probably no living creature more complicated than a worm that's
>> as dumb as a modern farm chicken ... Well, perhaps excepting
>> turkeys.
>
>But turkeys survive quite nicely in the wild. Not chickens.
>
*Wild* chickens are quite smart (comparatively); and do quite well.
They just aren't the same animal as a farm-bred chicken.
Neither are turkeys.
Modern farm-bred turkeys are reputedly so dumb they'll look up in
surprise at a heavy rain ... and DROWN because they haven't the smarts
to lower their heads. That might or might not be true; but in no way
are they like their wild cousins.
Nor are farm-bred chickens.
Walter Bushell
CBFalconer <cbfal...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Frank McCoy wrote:
> >
> ... snip ...
> >
> > But ... Sheep are so much *smarter* than chickens. There's
> > probably no living creature more complicated than a worm that's
> > as dumb as a modern farm chicken ... Well, perhaps excepting
> > turkeys.
>
> But turkeys survive quite nicely in the wild. Not chickens.
>
Among other things both have been breed for stupidity. I think there are
still wild turkeys, and ancestors of our modern chickens in the wild.
winston...@yahoo.com
> In article <467CAE87.F2FD7...@yahoo.com>,
This thread has gone to the birds!
krw
winston...@yahoo.com says...
Sure, wild turkeys are all over, here. Many hunt them.
> This thread has gone to the birds!
That's just fowl.
--
Keith
Tim McCaffrey
says...
>
>Philip Nasadowski <nasa...@usermale.com> writes:
>
>> In article <195b735ifm9uja8o5...@4ax.com>,
>> Frank McCoy <mcc...@millcomm.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Oops ... I forgot:
>> > The IBM PC *did* have on other thing going for it; something IBM later
>> > dearly regretted; but that was a large portion of the key that made
the
>> > machine such a success: A fairly open architecture.
>>
>> Wasn't the theory of publishing a bios listing and EVERY detail of the
>> thing basically that if anyone 'cloned' the PC, IBM could squash them in
>> court, since the BIOS was copyrighted code, and it would be darn hard to
>> claim you never saw it, given a paper copy was included with every
>> machine? IIRC, IBM did indeed squash a few clones until the infamous
>> 'white room' reverse engineering of it.
>
>I've never heard of IBM squashing any clones...
>
Columbia Data Products. They introduced a Hard Drive version before the XT
came out (a year before?). One of the first clones, and they really tried
to correct everything IBM fell short on (more slots, more memory, built in
serial/parallel ports).
- Tim
Tim McCaffrey
mcc...@millcomm.com says...
>
[snip Lynn's theory about 3270 emulators on IBM PC's]
>... and (of course) no other "Personal Computer" other than the IBM PC
>could do 3270 emulation for that price.
>
>Yeah, right.
>
>Like I said, there were other, far BETTER "Personal Computers" back
>then, that did more, and cost far less. They just didn't have the IBM
>logo on them. The IBM PC didn't even have the advantage of being made
>at IBM. All it *did* really have was the logo on the box as an
>advantage over the competition ... computer OR terminal-emulator.
>
>But that sigil on the cardboard container was more than enough.
>
>When compared with machines already on the market, like the Zenith-100,
>in price, performance, graphics ability, clarity, ease-of-use, ease of
>setup, ruggedness, MTBF, size, compatibility with existing software, or
>about any criteria you'd like to pick, frankly the IBM PC *stank*.
>
>Its advantage was the NAME on the box.
>Period. No followup.
>But that was more than enough.
While I don't disagree about the Z-100 being a superior machine (still
have one and parts for another). It wasn't introduced until March 1982,
and it is very difficult to get one. I got my Z-100H in Dec. 83.
The DEC Rainbow and Vector machines were also introduced about the same
time.
Except for some 8086 S-100 boards, IBM really did beat everybody to the
punch by about 6 months introducing the PC.
Now, the Z/H-89 could do 3270 emulation I think (it certainly could do
VT-100 emulation). It was out way before the PC.
- Tim
Tim McCaffrey
mcc...@millcomm.com says...
>
>>
>>Most of the computers out there that anyone had heard of in the same
>>price class as the IBM PC were Z-80 based CP/M machines. The IBM PC cost
>>more than they did, but it had the ability to have its memory expanded.
>>
(MP/M).
>>Most 16-bit machines then cost around $5,000, which was considerably
>>more than the price of an IBM PC.
>>
it. You had 5 slots: Add a video card (we'll say CGA for home use), a
serial card (to talk to a modem), a parallel card (for the printer),
several 64K memory cards, 3 16K memory expansions (for the motherboard), a
floppy controller, two floppy drives, and a color monitor (which IBM
didn't sell, I think Amstrad(?) was the only vendor of an RGB monitor that
didn't even display all the colors correctly).
IIRC, you add it all up and it came to at least $4,000 before the monitor
(I think that added $1000 to the price).
>As I recall, the Zenith-100, which came out about six months before the
>IBM crap, had TWO processors (Z-80 and 8086), Far better graphics than
>the IBM shit did until EGA came out, and a nice decent OS that
>integrated both processors together. You could actually run both CP/M
>and MS-DOS on the machine; though there you didn't have the integration.
>
Z-100 was introduced March 1982. It has (I use present tense since I
still have one) an 8088 & 8085. The graphics were 640x225 in 8 colors (if
you got the color upgrade), or 640x480 in 8 colors if changed out the 32K
chips for 64K chips and you could stand interlaced graphics (it is pretty
hard on the eyes).
>As I recall, the price was about the same or slightly LESS than the IBM
>PC, which in performance and capability wasn't even in the same league.
>
Price was about the same, CPU performance was about the same (5 Mhz vs.
4.77 Mhz). The Z-100 had some great graphics, but it didn't have a text
mode so some text mode applications seemed to run much slower on the
Z-100.
Still, I bought my Z-100 in Dec. 83, with educational discount, for
$4,500. Which included: 10 MB hard drive, 192K memory, (floppy,
serial/parallel ports were standard), and ZVM-135 color monitor.
I think normally the price was around $6,000. (The military got them for
around the same price).
>http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/zenith-100-original/index.htm
l
>
>Perhaps one of the main problems with selling the Zenith machine was
>that it was also sold as a Heathkit you could build yourself, as well as
>fully-assembled; and thus some people got the idea it was a "toy"
>computer.
>
- Tim
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
> While I don't disagree about the Z-100 being a superior machine (still
> have one and parts for another). It wasn't introduced until March
> 1982, and it is very difficult to get one. I got my Z-100H in
> Dec. 83.
the issue wasn't whether or not the Z-100 was a superior machine
... especially for consumer market place; the issue was where was
critical market and what were customers basing their buying decision
on.
looking at purely (home) personal computing ... that would make Z-100
competing with trs-80 and commodore 64 ... which had the largest volumes
in the (home) personal computing market. ... i.e. previous posts
with reference to volumes by yr
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#63 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#0 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
big issue for ibm/pc was that its volumes selling into business market
... it wasn't heavily competing with volumes in the purely home personal
computing market.
the issue has been raised repeatedly that nobody got fired for buying
IBM (in the business market). the other view point is that a lot of the
people making buying decision (in the business market) wouldn't have
technical expertise to make a distinction between two different
"personal computers" ... aka at the time, the majority of the business
people (making buying decision) wouldn't be able differentiate between
the ibm/pc and say the Z-100 ... so buying decision is likely to be
heavily influenced by lots of other factors; (business) brand
recognition, whether they had seen sales pitch, etc (some of this is
analogous to whether people buy brand names or generic in grocery
stores), how exactly compatible they were (and any attempt to pitch
significant differentiating features would, in turn undermine the
compatibility theme).
the clone business ... dating back to mainframe clone controllers in the
60s and mainframe clone processors in the 70s ... have tended to be
based on being essentially identical and selling on price ... mostly
able to get some small percentage of the market based purely on
price. Big part of the issue in selling into the business market, was
that there were only very small percentage of the decision makers that
believe they had technical expertise that would enable them to make
evaluation based on features. as a result, majority of clone marketing
was based (effectively) on being identical and selling on price alone
(with other differentiating features having little meaning to the
majority of the buyers).
So there might be some markets where differentiating features in
something like Z-100 would have meaning to perspective buyers ... say
putting them in competition with commodore 64 sales. In the (business)
ibm mainframe terminal emulation market segment ... positioning would
primarily be as a clone ... identical and selling purely on price (the
brand name vis-a-vis generic scenario). Then a major issue is
compatibility ... and thru the ages, some number of clones failed
compatibility ... and was leveraged as marketing countermeasure against
clone purchases. To get past the small percentage of early adopters
... specific clone vendors frequently had to somehow establish critical
mass install base ... effectively brand name of their own (and as
demonstration of true compatibility).
This sort of market penetration scenario was seen in the mid-70s with
clone (mainframe) processors ... and similar type progression could be
seen in the mid-80s with clone personal computers.
lots of pervious posts mentioning terminal emulation
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation
other posts in this specific thread:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#42 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#44 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#45 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#48 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#50 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#57 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#72 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
Tim McCaffrey
>
>timca...@aol.com (Tim McCaffrey) writes:
>> While I don't disagree about the Z-100 being a superior machine (still
>> have one and parts for another). It wasn't introduced until March
>> 1982, and it is very difficult to get one. I got my Z-100H in
>> Dec. 83.
>
>the issue wasn't whether or not the Z-100 was a superior machine
>... especially for consumer market place; the issue was where was
>critical market and what were customers basing their buying decision
>on.
>
until after the IBM PC was available. I was just agreeing with him on
the capabilities of the two systems. For instance, I believe the Z-100
got 3270 emulator software eventually, and it could use the in-built
serial ports because they were capable of synchronous operation. The PC
required a very expensive adapter card to do the same thing (but the PC's
was capable of higher speeds). And the 3270 PC was very expensive, if I
remember correctly (which was introduced much later).
Lynn do you have any figures about how many PCs were sold into the
corporate market vs. the home market in the first 18 months? (pre XT, in
other words). I think most people don't appreciate how much leverage the
corporate world has over the PC market. Which, of course, explains why
certain things sucked on the PC for such a long time (graphics, sound,
plug-n-play upgrades, etc), and other things were available very quickly
(networking, printer sharing, hard disks, etc).
- Tim
Anne & Lynn Wheeler
> Lynn do you have any figures about how many PCs were sold into the
> corporate market vs. the home market in the first 18 months? (pre XT, in
> other words). I think most people don't appreciate how much leverage the
> corporate world has over the PC market. Which, of course, explains why
> certain things sucked on the PC for such a long time (graphics, sound,
> plug-n-play upgrades, etc), and other things were available very quickly
> (networking, printer sharing, hard disks, etc).
re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#12 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
other than the overall numbers referenced in the previous posts:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#63 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007n.html#0 The Development of the Vital IBM PC in Spite of the Corporate Culture of IBM
I haven't yet found quotable numbers for break out of commercial
vis-a-vis consumer. however, the previous references on overall market
also do talk about the total number of different vendors in the
(personal computing) market during the early 80s (couple hundred)
... and lots of confusion and compatibility issues ... especially with
software/application life-cycle ... which was also somewhat the replay
of driving factor behind 360 mainframes.
however, his is somewhat different perspective on what it took
to be a succesful clone in that time-frame:
http://www.cwhonors.org/search/his_4a_detail.asp?id=3875
the above comments, from compaq perspective was that they got their
foothold in the clone business by driving compatability
search engine use uncovers a series of posts here
which are extracts from articles in that time-frame
including discussion of some of the market forces:
http://www.amigau.com/68K/dg/dg.htm
http://www.amigau.com/68K/dg/dg24.htm
http://www.amigau.com/68K/dg/dg25.htm
past post mentioning testimony in (mainframe) anti-trust litigation
about industry awareness concerning market requirement for compatibility
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2001j.html#33 Big black helicopters
the above also makes reference to conversation with somebody that worked
with TWJ-jr, saying all the litigation took all the interest out of
running the company since every (business) decision had to made from the
standpoint of how might the gov. react.
other past posts mentioning testimony in (mainframe) anti-trust litigation
about industry awareness concerning market requirement for compatibility
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/94.html#44 bloat
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/96.html#20 1401 series emulation still running?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/99.html#231 Why couldn't others compete against IBM?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002c.html#0 Did Intel Bite Off More Than It Can Chew?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2002d.html#26 looking for information on the IBM 7090 instruction set
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2003o.html#43 Computer folklore - forecasting Sputnik's orbit with
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2004d.html#22 System/360 40th Anniversary
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007e.html#18 Is computer history taught now?
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007f.html#77 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran developer, dies
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007m.html#34 IBM 8000 ???