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With hindsight, this article has all the pieces for understanding what happened with home computers but didn't quite put it together. The article is correct tha

With hindsight, this article has all the pieces for understanding what happened with home computers but didn't quite put it together. The article is correct that software was going to drive computer sales and that you had to depend on what at the time was a cottage industry. They even mention IBM being about to enter the market, but the article doesn't seem to be aware of or recognize the importance of the PC architecture in providing a common platform for software creators to target.

reaperducer 8y ago
Maybe because it wasn’t the first to do so. There were thousands of pieces of software available that would run on all different CP/M machines from lots of different manufacturers. Usually the only difference was the disk format, and in those cases you could often order the software on the disk type of your choice. If you had a real outlier of a system, there were often equivalent packages written in BASIC or LISP or PASCAL that you could buy the source code for to run on your machine. People today would laugh at the notion of paying $1,500 for an accounting program delivered in BASIC. But that’s how it was.
pjmlp 8y ago
Because PCs were IBM only when they appeared. The clone market only happened thanks to the clean room reverse engineering done by Compaq, which prevented IBM to legally kill the clones. They tried to do it later via the MCA architecture and PS/2 platform, but failed to do so.
davidgay 8y ago
> They even mention IBM being about to enter the market They're referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr - a (very much failed) "home computer market" entry. (The IBM PC is 1981, this article is 1983)
- grigjd3 8y ago
  The Wikipedia article you link even has a quote of an analyst saying this machine will establish the operating system for the home computer market.

reaperducer 8y ago

Maybe because it wasn’t the first to do so. There were thousands of pieces of software available that would run on all different CP/M machines from lots of different manufacturers. Usually the only difference was the disk format, and in those cases you could often order the software on the disk type of your choice. If you had a real outlier of a system, there were often equivalent packages written in BASIC or LISP or PASCAL that you could buy the source code for to run on your machine. People today would laugh at the notion of paying $1,500 for an accounting program delivered in BASIC. But that’s how it was.

pjmlp 8y ago

Because PCs were IBM only when they appeared. The clone market only happened thanks to the clean room reverse engineering done by Compaq, which prevented IBM to legally kill the clones. They tried to do it later via the MCA architecture and PS/2 platform, but failed to do so.

davidgay 8y ago

> They even mention IBM being about to enter the market They're referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr - a (very much failed) "home computer market" entry. (The IBM PC is 1981, this article is 1983)

grigjd3 8y ago
The Wikipedia article you link even has a quote of an analyst saying this machine will establish the operating system for the home computer market.