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> But there's a big difference between little experiments and betting the company on an auto-cannibalization strategy. IBM didn't do "have the guts" to do that

> But there's a big difference between little experiments and betting the company on an auto-cannibalization strategy. IBM didn't do "have the guts" to do that either. The IBM PC was a skunkworks project by a team of 12 lead by Don Estridge in Boca Raton Florida. The reasons for its success can be seen, in hindsight, to be a consequence of its lack of internal funding and status within IBM, which had a business model focussed on leasing mainframes to large corporate customers. IBM didn't have resources to develop custom hardware or to write software for the PC. Estridge's team used off the shelf chips including Intel's 8088 cpu. To make it easy for 3rd party developers to support the system, IBM published the BIOS source code. This had the effect of making it possible for Taiwanese manufacturers to clone the PC and sell cheap copies. DEC had no matching ecosystem. Its Rainbow 100 sold for $4K whilst IBM PC clones sold for $1K. The killer apps for the first generation of PCs were word processing and spreadsheets. PC's could perform word processing better than minicomputers, and spreadsheets were invented on PC's with VisiCalc and then later, Lotus 1-2-3. Consequently, IBM and the Taiwanese clones, the best known example of which was Dell Computers, were able to sell PC's into corporate accounts where IT managers would allow them to take the burden off mainframe data-processing systems by performing the personal office tasks which mainframes and minis couldn't efficiently do.

WalterBright 6y ago
> Its Rainbow 100 sold for $4K whilst IBM PC clones sold for $1K. The Rainbow also requires special floppy disks that cost $5 each instead of a buck, with zero difference in performance or capacity. DEC-aficionados I knew literally laughed at this and shook their heads, and abandoned DEC.
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- wombatmobile 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100 The floppy disk drives, known as the RX50, accepted proprietary 400 kB single-sided, quad-density 5¼-inch diskettes. Initial versions of the operating systems on the Rainbow did not allow for low-level formatting, requiring users to purchase RX50 media from Digital Equipment Corporation. The high cost of media ($5 per disk) led to accusations of vendor "lock-in" against Digital. However, later versions of MS-DOS and CP/M allowed formatting of diskettes. Of note was the single motor used to drive both disk drives via a common spindle, which were arranged one on top of the other. That meant that one disk went underneath the first but inserted upside-down. This earned the diskette drive the nickname "toaster". The unusual orientation confused many first-time users, who would complain that the machine would not read the disk.

WalterBright 6y ago

> Its Rainbow 100 sold for $4K whilst IBM PC clones sold for $1K. The Rainbow also requires special floppy disks that cost $5 each instead of a buck, with zero difference in performance or capacity. DEC-aficionados I knew literally laughed at this and shook their heads, and abandoned DEC.

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wombatmobile 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100 The floppy disk drives, known as the RX50, accepted proprietary 400 kB single-sided, quad-density 5¼-inch diskettes. Initial versions of the operating systems on the Rainbow did not allow for low-level formatting, requiring users to purchase RX50 media from Digital Equipment Corporation. The high cost of media ($5 per disk) led to accusations of vendor "lock-in" against Digital. However, later versions of MS-DOS and CP/M allowed formatting of diskettes. Of note was the single motor used to drive both disk drives via a common spindle, which were arranged one on top of the other. That meant that one disk went underneath the first but inserted upside-down. This earned the diskette drive the nickname "toaster". The unusual orientation confused many first-time users, who would complain that the machine would not read the disk.