[HN Gopher] Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC
___________________________________________________________________
Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC
Author : dshipper
Score : 140 points
Date : 2024-06-06 10:55 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (every.to)
(TXT) w3m dump (every.to)
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I was living in Texas at the time of Flight 191. I was no fan of
| the IBM PC but it was still gut-wrenching to hear that the father
| of the machine had been killed.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines_Flight_191
|
| This was the crash that brought the term "microburst" into the
| national consciousness.
| Trailing5650 wrote:
| A fascinating training video provided to American Airlines
| pilots discussing windshear and microbursts. Flight 191 is an
| example used https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxXwqAm1a-Y
| ordu wrote:
| Kyra Dempsey wrote about it.
|
| https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/water-wind-and-fire-the-...
| tromp wrote:
| It's rare that a tech story brings me to tears, but I couldn't
| help feel one swelling up when reading the final paragraphs.
|
| > Eventually, it was Wilkie who made the first move. Overwhelmed
| with emotion, his eyes red and swollen with grief, he stepped
| forward and detached the red rosette from the lapel of his suit
| jacket. It was the same one Don had given him years before.
| Leaning down, he gently placed the rosette on the casket.
|
| It feels like there should be a movie made about this story...
| tracker1 wrote:
| I feel the same way. The end of the story is just sad. I wish
| that more companies could break their own structures to offer
| rewards, bonuses and more freedom to teams like this. The kinds
| of people that thrive with these kinds of opportunities tend
| not to do as well with general corporate culture.
|
| So many times a relatively small upstart team with enough
| freedom will accomplish greatness, only for corporate culture
| to completely destroy what was.
| mellosouls wrote:
| For people who are interested in this era, _Halt and Catch Fire_
| is a terrific portrayal of the sorts of characters and battles
| that defined it, albeit from more of a startup perspective.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWrioRji60A
| st3ve445678 wrote:
| Fantastic show, highly recommend.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| Absolutely horrible show and I advise people to not waste
| their time.
| LaundroMat wrote:
| Why is that?
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| The acting is horrible. The writing is terrible. The
| story veers off into areas unrelated. There is a moment
| of a thoroughly unrelated homosexual encounter. (What was
| the point of that?!) Moments I know that are so really
| stretched too far to be believable. And on and on.
|
| So bad I couldn't finish the series.
| radicaldreamer wrote:
| Sorry you have bad taste and don't understand character
| development outside of in your face plot points
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "The writing is terrible"
|
| and what fiction have _you_ ever written?
|
| I lived through that era, too. As historical fiction,
| HACF is pretty decent. "areas unrelated" -- hello, it's
| FICTION about a specific era, and, without knowing what
| specifically you're talking about: maybe those
| "unrelated" areas are period-setting, or character-
| developing.
|
| HACF not for you. Let's leave it at that. You can't
| please everyone.
| folsom wrote:
| I think the homosexual encounter is to show how joe and
| folks like joe use sex as a tool to exert power over
| other people.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's extremely contrived and deus-ex-machina all the way
| through.
|
| The "history" the show goes over is crammed into it's
| Drama first story. The history is there for nostalgia
| bait, not to celebrate the history or educate. That's why
| pretty much everything interesting that happened in
| computing was mangled into coming from the same like 5
| people.
|
| And the characters are all just narcissistic assholes who
| are self destructive because it means the show gets to
| carry on for another season. It also has the cliche
| density to feel like a high schooler's homework project.
|
| If you find yourself addicted to reality TV drama, you
| will enjoy it.
|
| Imagine if you tried to take "It's always sunny in
| Philadelphia" seriously, and also were watching it
| because you cared about Philadelphia history. I felt
| actively patronized the whole time.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Wrong. That's like saying the Patrick O'Brian
| Aubrey/Maturin novels are "contrived." Hello, it's
| _fiction_. It isn 't there to educate, except insofar as
| the situations the characters find themselves in teach
| you something about what it was like back then.
|
| Season 2, though, I couldn't watch.
| calmworm wrote:
| Completely inaccurate analogy using IASIP and Philly.
| lol.
| ghaff wrote:
| Such insightful commentary!
|
| I didn't find it a perfect show--especially latterly--but
| it captured a lot of the era, such as COMDEX, pretty well.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| As insightful as the comment I replied to.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Precisely
| trollerator23 wrote:
| Right? I couldn't watch past the first 5 minutes. The fact
| that one of the main characters is a "cool" girl at a time
| where all the characters were a bunch of nerdy guys told me
| it was a lot of woke revisionist BS.
|
| To be clear, I do know quite of few girls like this main
| character that are important in the tech industry NOW
| (Lymor Fried, Jeri Ellsworth, etc etc among many) but just
| not back then.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| No, you're wrong. I was there. It _was_ mostly guys, but
| there were plenty of women as well. Radia Perlman, to
| name just one famous one. I recall another from Lawrence
| Livermore whom I met at an IETF. I went to grad school
| with several of them.
|
| There certainly is a lot of woke revisionist BS around.
| No doubt about that.
|
| Edit: in my current book "This New Internet Thing" one of
| the characters, Cassie, wants to adopt a child as a
| single woman. I got advice on that process by Heidi
| Buelow (RIP), who was last at Oracle but worked on the
| Xerox Star, and adopted two children of her own (Cassie
| is not modeled on Heidi, except for that). Heidi
| unfortunately died while I was writing it, and I can't
| find any online obituary on her.
|
| Since we're talking about "back in the day" naturally
| some of those people have crossed the Great Divide. You
| can find a few women in here as well:
|
| https://decconnection.org/memorials.htm
|
| Not a lot, of course. But not none.
| neilv wrote:
| > _The fact that one of the main characters is a "cool"
| girl at a time where all the characters were a bunch of
| nerdy guys_
|
| From what I recall seeing as a kid, and when working in
| my teens, that wasn't too unlikely.
|
| There were a lot of women in computing, of various pre-
| Yahoo-IPO eras.
|
| I think the relative numbers diminished dramatically with
| the dotcom gold rush, and the newer bro cultures, and
| gatekeeping.
|
| Only in recent years have we started seeing more women in
| "tech" again.
| pjmorris wrote:
| I'll add Judy Estrin to the list of cool girls from the
| time, in addition to the non-famous ones I worked with.
| Her little company stomped our big company at making X
| terminals back in the 80's. We were probably 70:30 M/F
| among our ~two dozen new grads.
| trollerator23 wrote:
| You guys have in fact proven my point by bringing up all
| two of them.
| kragen wrote:
| i know a significant number of women who were important
| in the tech industry back then too
| ErneX wrote:
| I agree.
| mistyvales wrote:
| Came to say the same thing :D
|
| The character of Cameron was highly inspired by Romero. In
| fact, the book Masters of Doom is kind of a blueprint for the
| show in some ways
| endofreach wrote:
| One of my favourite shows of all time. Wish there was more of
| it...
|
| Thanks for the reminder to rewatch it. I really need that show
| now.
| pan69 wrote:
| I really enjoyed the first season (especially the first couple
| of episodes) as the focus of the story is the release of the
| product and the struggles associated with it.
|
| The second season seems to become the typical personal drama /
| relationship / betrayal / writers kung-fu story arch / etc.
| that every series comprising more than one season seems to
| spiral into these days.
|
| So, highly recommend the first season!
| nedrylandJP wrote:
| There is a "high tech middle school" with his namesake in Boca
| Raton, FL, next to the former 1960s IBM R&D complex.
|
| https://www.palmbeachschools.org/DonEstridgeMiddle
| yardie wrote:
| Well, TIL. When I see a school named after someone who is not
| widely famous I assume they were an educator or politician.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Reading Boca Raton reminded me, they used the names of cities
| close to the offices for the internal names for products. I co-
| oped at IBM in Austin in the late 1980s and we tested the new
| models of PC Jr/Portable/PS2/peripherals and the internal
| codenames were stuff like Boca Raton and Cedar Key (which none
| of us got until our boss told us) but I can no longer remember
| which was which anymore.
| yardie wrote:
| I grew up in South Florida in the 80s and 90s. I was familiar
| with the IBM office in Boca Raton, nicknamed T-Rex, and had a few
| school friends who worked at IBM on the IBM PC. From what I can
| remember, the Boca campus was like garden leave. IBM sent you
| there when they didn't want you but couldn't fire you. So it was
| full of IBM misfits who were thrown out of HQ. I never made the
| connection to Flight 191, and assumed it was because of Hurricane
| Andrew. But once the PC market took off IBM wanted that team
| brought back into the veil. A lot of my friends moved to Cary,
| NC, more famously known as Research Triangle.
|
| Miami, and South Florida overall, is kind of a crazy place to be.
| Every couple of decades people out west or from up north
| rediscover we actually exist. There are good engineers here but
| the West and Northeast have loads of money. So once CS/SWE really
| took off as a career the companies down here couldn't/wouldn't
| compete. Trust me, if you were an Asian/Indian kid in Florida in
| the 90s and told your parents you wanted to work in software they
| were going to beat some sense into you.
|
| I've watched money flood into the area and then get carried back
| out when the financial tides changed. I always imagined Miami
| could have been kind of like a Silicon Valley but the politics,
| money, geography will work against it.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I always console myself one day that New Orleans will be Miami
| with drinking water.
| ghaff wrote:
| The IBM PC in particular was probably never especially
| significant to IBM as a whole whatever its effect on the
| computer industry generally.
|
| As someone who had IBM as a client for a number of years, we
| observed that there seemed to be a lot of IBM folks who
| basically ended up in some Siberia in one form or another.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> His divisional heads always had the same answer.
| Microcomputers--home computing--were a fad. They were low-cost
| and low-profit. Let others scrabble around in the metaphorical
| dirt of home computing. The real money was in the markets that
| IBM's divisions already dominated--selling vast mainframes and
| minicomputer systems to large businesses. Cary was even told to
| buy Atari, which by then had established itself as America's home
| video game system of choice. That's all home computers were good
| for: gaming.
|
| This attitude was so short sighted. A friend of mines dad was
| using their Apple II for work-related spreadsheets and thought it
| was the greatest this ever. Not sure how IBM folks could not see
| this opportunity just because it was smaller scale than "what
| they did". 20 years later Intel seemed to have missed the mobile
| market due to a similar attitude.
| ghaff wrote:
| In the case of Intel, based on what I saw, they were just
| desperate/convinced to turn the x86 into a beachhead for mobile
| (but Flash will be the same!) but that ended up not making
| sense.
| contingencies wrote:
| A friend of mine's father was the head of _Digital_ [0] in
| Australia and later sent to Boston after being promoted. I
| distinctly recall speaking to him in around 1995 regarding
| Linux. He, along with I believe a large number of commercial
| Unix vendors, snubbed his nose at Linux suggesting it was a
| passing fad and would never challenge their "serious" Unix.
| This is interesting because Jon 'Maddog' Hall[1], then CTO of
| Digital (before it was acquired by Compaq in 1998, acquired in
| turn by HP in 2002) certainly did get it... I interviewed him
| once in Sydney circa '99 and had a good long chat once in
| Taiwan circa '01 after crossing paths by chance. He was
| traveling the world proselytizing Linux in shorts and flip-
| flops, had a firm belief in embedded Linux changing the world
| (Android[2] wasn't released until nearly a decade later in
| 2008), but was yet to announce he was gay (took another
| decade). Fast forward 30 years: nobody younger than 40 has
| practically even heard of the company, Linux is in every
| household, and the very idea of a commercial Unix a joke.
|
| Furthermore, in perfectly delicious irony, IBM's own
| modifications to Linux[3] to support the allocation of
| workloads to its giant server hardware have enabled the
| popularization of containers, further reducing demands for
| server equipment, increasing portability between desktop and
| server environments, and substantially drawing down the cost of
| provisioning for cloud services - the arch rival to traditional
| mainframe mentality. Today, in a world awash with dirt cheap
| and ever-present processing power and storage, as well as
| recently unimaginable levels of connectivity, we stand almost
| at the point where the term "server" itself has become an
| anachronism and consumption-oriented devices draw consumers
| toward "services" (often as paid for subscriptions).
|
| IMHO some industries which will look nothing like today's
| version in 30 years' time: food, oil, transport, construction,
| clothing, health, and education. _Carpe diem_.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer) [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) [3]
| https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
| LaundroMat wrote:
| It's close to what Clayton Christensen describes as disruptive
| innovation (his examples were the steel industry and radio's):
| incumbents are forced higher up the chain by low quality
| competitors ("home computers are only good for gaming") that
| answer an unanswered need well enough. Once these competitors
| gain a foothold, quality improves and incumbents have less and
| less of a market.
| phone8675309 wrote:
| > Not sure how IBM folks could not see this opportunity just
| because it was smaller scale than "what they did"
|
| They thought it was a fad - that centralized systems
| (coincidentally, the machines they made) would be the computing
| platform that people would pay-per-minute/pay-per-hour/pay-per-
| month to access remotely. They wanted to be an information
| utility - a supplier to all - instead of selling a small, low
| margin box for one-time revenue.
|
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his
| salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Are you talking about Microsoft Azure?
| folsom wrote:
| So you are saying that they were too far ahead of their time.
| kragen wrote:
| google, fecebutt, amazon, and azure seem to be doing okay
| with centralized systems providing continuing revenue
| dkarl wrote:
| None of those division heads were trying to honestly assess the
| microcomputer market. They were trying to stay in harmony with
| opinion at their level and higher in IBM.
|
| That's what you get at that level in a company that big. Anyone
| who is two or more levels from the top of the org chart and
| also two or more levels from the bottom lives in a reality that
| consists entirely of the attitudes and opinions of other
| people, weighted by each person's ability to impact their
| career. If they saw that the building they were in was on fire,
| their thought process would go something like: "Bob isn't here
| today because he's at that sales meeting. When he hears about
| the fire he'll downplay it as something minor, so I shouldn't
| evacuate or he'll think less of me. But Bob's boss Don is here.
| If Don evacuates and I don't, that might Don feel embarrassed
| and emasculated, and he'll take it out on Bob. So I need to
| evacuate if and only if Don evacuates. Bob won't mind me
| evacuating if Don does it. But Don's office is on the other
| side of that wall of approaching flames. Shit. My only chance
| is if he's in a meeting on this side of the building, so I can
| track him down and see what he's doing. Let me check his
| calendar real quick...."
| bee_rider wrote:
| A ridiculous and totally unrealistic example, and also the
| funniest description of office social politics I think I've
| ever seen.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > This attitude was so short sighted.
|
| Reminds me of Kodak.
| tracker1 wrote:
| They hamstrung and killed OS/2 similarly.
| garius wrote:
| Yup. I'll be covering OS/2 when I look at operating systems
| in this period.
|
| The level of foot-shooting by IBM on that one was ridiculous.
| macintux wrote:
| Could IBM have succeeded given Microsoft's betrayal? Or did
| Microsoft just give up on IBM ever delivering something?
| ordu wrote:
| _> Not sure how IBM folks could not see this opportunity just
| because it was smaller scale than "what they did"._
|
| Bureaucracy can be like that. Big bosses who might be really
| interested in increased profits rely on their subordinates to
| see the market, but subordinates are risk averse and don't want
| to change anything. Add corporate politics, people fighting not
| for innovations or for a market share but for promotions, and
| you'll get the picture.
|
| It seems to be that they besides all that they were
| _ideological_ , believed that size does matter and scorned on
| those who made computers smaller than theirs. Ideology means
| that people would have troubles to see anything that
| contradicts their ideology. Peer pressure, social desirability
| and all these things set up individual biases.
| jes5199 wrote:
| there's a sense in which IBM was right to fear the PC - it, in
| fact, killed their main industry, and they were not able to
| compete well in the new space, despite defining the standard.
| maybe they could have pursued it more enthusiastically and done
| better in the 1990s, but, it still would have been fighting
| against the tide
| fortran77 wrote:
| It also killed their very successful Selectric business!
| figers wrote:
| For people who are interested in this era, read Fire in the
| valley, I have never read a book so fast in college, a great
| read!
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Valley-Making-Personal-Computer/...
| kennethrc wrote:
| > "The system would do two things. It would draw an absolutely
| beautiful picture of a nude lady, ..."
|
| Lena? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna)
| garius wrote:
| I did try and find out if it was. Sadly couldn't find anything
| to confirm it!
| zabzonk wrote:
| i believe that estridge was being head-hunted at apple as ceo
| before they eventually hired scully. sad thing is that if they
| had hired him, he might even be alive today, but he preferred to
| stay at big blue.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Classic example of Worse is Better.
|
| All competing architectures were better than IBM PC architecture,
| PC BIOS was bad, chosen processor instruction set was the worst,
| MS-DOS operating system was bad. Only the keyboard was good.
|
| What made it winner was open architecture, 80-column screen and
| IBM name.
| garius wrote:
| keyboard wasn't great either, to begin with!
| nabla9 wrote:
| Model M keyboards are ridiculously good. They are consistent
| for every key, have great tactile feedback and are extremely
| durable.
| forinti wrote:
| I did some historical research to understand why the PC caught
| on (it made no sense to my 1980s teenage mind).
|
| A PC with 80 columns card, 64KB of RAM and a floppy drive cost
| about the same as an Apple II Plus with the same specs
| (US$2,700).
|
| A BBC Micro would set you back about US$1,500 (PS900). It
| didn't offer slots, but did have 80 columns standard. It also
| had a lot of ports.
|
| You couldn't even argue that the 8088 was much faster than the
| 6502. BASIC ran a lot faster on the 2MHz Beeb than on the PC.
|
| The only thing that makes sense to me is that the people who
| bought it on launch were planning to use more than 64KB of RAM
| (which was rather expensive then).
| surfingdino wrote:
| It was an open platform. In those days, you were getting a
| set of printed manuals including schematics of the machine
| when you bought one. It created an ecosystem of clones and
| expansion hardware. PC-DOS/MS-DOS provided an easy path to
| port CP-M software.
| deater wrote:
| I'm a bit curious about this part of the article:
|
| > Unlike all of its major rivals--including the Apple II--the IBM
| PC was built > with an open architecture.
|
| The Apple II, designed by Woz, is famously open, to the point the
| original model came with full schematics and ROM listings which
| made it trivially cloneable. I'm curious why this isn't
| considered an open architecture.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Apple II hand proprietary design. You could not clone it
| legally.
|
| Just like posting source code does not make the code open,
| publishing schematics does not make the design open.
| deater wrote:
| no, you could very easily clone the Apple II easily and it
| was done many, many times
|
| it's true that eventually Apple started suing people, but
| until Apple vs Franklin it was unclear if you could even
| copyright a BIOS. And once that was determined, people had to
| clean-room reverse engineer the BIOS but it was possible to
| make clones (see the Laser 128 and many many others)
|
| this is just as open as the IBM PC was. You couldn't just
| drop a copy of the PC bios into your clone, you had to go to
| a 3rd-party reverse-engineered BIOS
| tombert wrote:
| Even more, Apple tried to block the Laser 128 and failed,
| since VTech didn't actually do anything illegal; they
| reverse engineered the Apple APIs and licensed BASIC
| directly from Microsoft.
|
| They were actually pretty cool computers; half the price of
| the name brand Apple while being mostly fully compatible
| with all the software. I've only played with one once, but
| I thought it was pretty cool. Sad that VTech only makes
| crappy kids toys now.
| joezydeco wrote:
| The key was that by publishing the BIOS source in the open,
| it was hard to prove that you _weren 't_ exposed to the
| source code when you wrote your own BIOS.
|
| The clean-room approach was a neat hack that solved the
| problem, but it was hard to find people that had never seen
| the IBM source _and_ could prove it.
|
| https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-
| comp...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| One consistent theme you get from business history is:
|
| There is very little penalty for being wrong. There is often a
| _huge_ penalty for being right, if the powers-that-be opposed
| you.
| elzbardico wrote:
| One of the biggest advantages of being young is still not
| knowing how real this can be.
| ghaff wrote:
| It might make an interesting business book--maybe I'll write it--
| what realistic business strategies companies that are widely
| viewed as failures could have followed though industry changes
| that boards/shareholders wouldn't have revolted about.
|
| I'm not even sure IBM is a great example. It had a really rough
| stretch but is still there as a very profitable dividend-paying
| large corporation even if it's not considered cool.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/4MbcF
| KerrAvon wrote:
| This part is factually incorrect:
|
| > The easiest way to set that standard wasn't just to sell
| machines; it was to let other companies sell parts, software, and
| even whole computers that would be compatible with your machine.
| Unlike all of its major rivals--including the Apple II--the IBM
| PC was built with an open architecture.
|
| The Apple II was effectively as open as the PC. And IBM didn't
| want clones any more than Apple did. Both the Apple II and the PC
| were eventually legally cloned, and neither company could do
| anything about it.
| labrador wrote:
| The end of this article is so beautifully written it made me tear
| up
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-06-06 23:00 UTC)