[HN Gopher] How the IBM PC Won, Then Lost, the Personal Computer...
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How the IBM PC Won, Then Lost, the Personal Computer Market
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 31 points
Date : 2021-07-21 21:03 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| Liambp wrote:
| If you have any interest in the origins of the personal computer
| you should track down the sublime documentary series "Triumph of
| the Nerds" by Bob Cringely. You an find various versions on
| Youtube.
| laumars wrote:
| Also I'd recommend 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' and 'Silicon
| Cowboys'
| MrRadar wrote:
| No mention of the PS/2 and Micro Channel Architecture? MCA was
| IBM's attempt to put the genie back in the bottle and redefine
| the PC back to being something they wholly controlled, and it
| utterly failed. It also didn't help that they were late to the
| market with 386-based computers (Compaq having beaten them to the
| punch with the Deskpro 386) which already signaled they were
| losing their market leadership position that allowed them to
| define the PC platform. In response to MCA, the PC industry
| formed an independent consortium to define the EISA bus and later
| Intel itself eventually took over as the de facto standards
| originator for PCs by developing PCI, USB, ATX, ACPI, AC'97/HD
| Audio, (U)EFI, and a large part of the other foundational
| standards on which modern PCs are built.
| city41 wrote:
| According to this video[1], Compaq's portable also bested IBM.
| It was Compaq's first product, and everyone thought IBM's
| upcoming portable would wipe them out, but they held strong and
| counted on IBM to have production problems, which they did, so
| Compaq held onto this segment.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEMhpInIACk
| CurtHagenlocher wrote:
| PS/2s were overpriced and underpowered, and people I knew told
| me that a surprisingly high percentage of them arrived DoA.
| That was basically the end of "no one ever got fired for buying
| IBM".
| D13Fd wrote:
| They did talk in the article about how slow IBM was to adopt
| the 386.
| protomyth wrote:
| Hard to adopt the 386 when they basically bought the whole
| supply of 286's.
| okareaman wrote:
| PC clones killed IBM in the PC market, which matches how I
| remember it
|
| > Both Microsoft and Intel made a fortune selling IBM's
| competitors the same products they sold to IBM. Rivals figured
| out that IBM had set the de facto technical standards for PCs, so
| they developed compatible versions they could bring to market
| more quickly and sell for less.
| CurtHagenlocher wrote:
| "OS/2 finally came out in late 1987, priced at $340, plus $2,000
| for additional memory to run it. By then, Windows had been on the
| market for two years and was proving hugely popular."
|
| No. Windows was basically irrelevant until 3.0 came out in 1990.
| midasuni wrote:
| Yes, it was dos and lotus123 and maybe word perfect that were
| popular in the 80s.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Not contradicting, just adding that MS Word for DOS was also
| _somewhat_ popular.
| analog31 wrote:
| All in all, I think IBM did mostly the right thing. Given that
| they published their hardware and software interface standards,
| they must have expected to be creating a platform as well as a
| product. They might not have adequately anticipated the
| resilience of DOS when they tried to come out with OS/2.
| MrRadar wrote:
| They definitely underestimated the market's requirements for
| DOS compatibility. Microsoft in contrast understood that which
| is why Windows (though technically inferior to OS/2 in many
| respects, at least until Windows 95) ultimately won. The
| Digital Antiquarian blog has an excellent (if long) series of
| articles covering the history of Windows from its original
| conception as a product up through Windows 3.1, including looks
| at OS/2 and other competing products:
| https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/doing-windows-part-1-ms-dos-a...
| cameldrv wrote:
| It was technically inferior in many respects, but mostly not
| ones that mattered. I ran OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 for a while, and
| it was dog slow and consumed massive amounts of memory
| compared to Windows.
|
| The main selling point of OS/2 was supposed to be that it had
| preemptive multitasking and protected memory, which was
| supposed to make it much more stable compared to the
| (constantly crashing) Windows 3.0/3.1.
|
| The problem was that the Workplace Shell (the GUI) had some
| sort of single message queue that could be blocked by a
| misbehaving program. This would cause the GUI to hang. While
| it was true that the system would continue to task switch,
| and you could even telnet into the machine after this
| happened, from the console, the system was completely
| unresponsive, so it was functionally equivalent to the OS
| crashing.
|
| IBM as an organization didn't seem to understand what
| features were actually relevant to normal users and
| prioritize them. It could do a bunch of things like smoothly
| multitasking multiple DOS apps, that were technically
| impressive but not that important to users.
| flomo wrote:
| I believe you are correct. The IBM PC's direct competition was
| not so much Apple but 'business standard' CP/M Z80/8080
| machines from a variety of vendors.
|
| Also IBM was under an antitrust decree requiring reasonable and
| discriminatory licensing, so they didn't have much choice in
| the matter. Once this was lifted, they went the Microchannel
| route.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Lenovo bought IBM's PC business for $1.75 billion in 2004, or
| about $2.51 billion adjusted for inflation. Lenovo's PC and smart
| device sales hit a record 12.4 billion in its FY2020, mostly due
| to Windows-based PCs. I would argue that had IBM ceded software
| to Microsoft, and had it focused on hardware and PowerPC chip
| compatibility, the company could have greatly improved on the 20%
| margins that were the impetus for selling its PC business to
| Lenovo.
| protomyth wrote:
| They wanted access to China and Lenovo gave that to them.
| Trias11 wrote:
| I still remember the nonsense cost of IBM PS/2 i386 for like
| $14,000-$21,000.
|
| IBM approached PC revolution with a dinosauric mainframe mindset
| and that killed it.
|
| For them.
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(page generated 2021-07-21 23:00 UTC)