4 ms·

I remember when IBM launched the PC and it looked ludicrously overpriced and lacking in "modern" features (like graphics and sound). I didn't buy one for mysel

I remember when IBM launched the PC and it looked ludicrously overpriced and lacking in "modern" features (like graphics and sound). I didn't buy one for myself until the 386 came out. The article's claim about "IBM’s strategic error in not retaining rights to the operating system" begs the question if the PC revolution would have happened had Microsoft not owned it. I personally doubt it. While IBM had success up to the IBM AT, there really wasn't much revolutionary about them and they were stupidly expensive. The clones really made the PC a success. It's just tragic that the crap SW and HW won the market.

jandrese 5y ago
It's a classic worse is better scenario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
flyinghamster 5y ago
But for short-sightedness at DEC and Xerox, things might have been different indeed. Unfortunately, DEC hamstrung their micros until it was too late, and Xerox's pie-in-the-sky machines at PARC were expensive enough that their real-world offering was the 820, a me-too 8-bit CP/M system that came out just in time to be stomped by the PC.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
> The clones really made the PC a success. Yes. Price competition is a wonderful thing. They undercut IBM's pricing model. IBM tried to get it back with the PS/2, which was patent protected. But that totally missed the point. > It's just tragic that the crap SW and HW won the market. Crap SW and HW made the market. There wasn't much of a market for PCs at the PS/2 price point. There was a much larger market at the PC clone price point. (I'd guess that halving the price led to something like 10 times the volume. The PS/2 was locked out of any meaningful volume just by the price.) General rule: The PC I can afford is better than the PC I can't. Sure, it may be technically inferior. Doesn't matter. The one I can't afford has zero utility for me, so the one I can afford is actually better (for me), no matter how crap it is. The other thing that made that market was the clone vendors cooperating to define the EISA bus standard. It created a huge market (all the clone companies put together) for peripherals. And because you could get anything in an EISA peripheral, that created a huge market for EISA PCs. It was mutually reinforcing to create an exploding market. If they had fought each other with competing bus standards, that would have killed the market.
- hakfoo 5y ago
  I'm sort of skeptical of how important EISA was from a market perspective. It seems to have been primarily a premium option-- you might see it in the super-expensive early 486DX workstations with SCSI and a fancy video card, but the commodity desktop with a 386SX, 4M RAM, and a small IDE hard drive was just using vanilla ISA. From that perspective, all the clone makers really did was being intelligently lazy. They just built IBM 5170s with faster CPUs for years. It was probably MORE effort to develop a custom bus and break all the existing expansion options. You saw some brief experimentation with that for the early "local bus" machines before the advent of VL-Bus, but that was quite a few years after the debut of MCA and ISA had legitimately run out of gas. EISA might have been important from the perspective of building a vendor-neutral standards process.
  - nradov 5y ago
    EISA was an enabler which allowed broader growth of the whole PC market. Office LANs were just starting to become really popular. So EISA allowed a single Novell NetWare server PC to have enough bus bandwidth to run a network of cheaper ISA PCs.
  - timw4mail 5y ago
    EISA was probably more important in that it lead to PCI, than the standard itself.
    - FullyFunctional 5y ago
      Amending my "crap HW" comment: PCI was a massive step forward and PCIe even more so. PCIe to me marked a turning point where PC IO could be considered enterprise-class. Obviously the CPUs had improved a lot by then with the Pentium Pro marking a milestone and the beginning of Really Good implementations. (The ISA of course remained garbage).

jandrese 5y ago

It's a classic worse is better scenario. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

flyinghamster 5y ago

But for short-sightedness at DEC and Xerox, things might have been different indeed. Unfortunately, DEC hamstrung their micros until it was too late, and Xerox's pie-in-the-sky machines at PARC were expensive enough that their real-world offering was the 820, a me-too 8-bit CP/M system that came out just in time to be stomped by the PC.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

> The clones really made the PC a success. Yes. Price competition is a wonderful thing. They undercut IBM's pricing model. IBM tried to get it back with the PS/2, which was patent protected. But that totally missed the point. > It's just tragic that the crap SW and HW won the market. Crap SW and HW made the market. There wasn't much of a market for PCs at the PS/2 price point. There was a much larger market at the PC clone price point. (I'd guess that halving the price led to something like 10 times the volume. The PS/2 was locked out of any meaningful volume just by the price.) General rule: The PC I can afford is better than the PC I can't. Sure, it may be technically inferior. Doesn't matter. The one I can't afford has zero utility for me, so the one I can afford is actually better (for me), no matter how crap it is. The other thing that made that market was the clone vendors cooperating to define the EISA bus standard. It created a huge market (all the clone companies put together) for peripherals. And because you could get anything in an EISA peripheral, that created a huge market for EISA PCs. It was mutually reinforcing to create an exploding market. If they had fought each other with competing bus standards, that would have killed the market.

hakfoo 5y ago
I'm sort of skeptical of how important EISA was from a market perspective. It seems to have been primarily a premium option-- you might see it in the super-expensive early 486DX workstations with SCSI and a fancy video card, but the commodity desktop with a 386SX, 4M RAM, and a small IDE hard drive was just using vanilla ISA. From that perspective, all the clone makers really did was being intelligently lazy. They just built IBM 5170s with faster CPUs for years. It was probably MORE effort to develop a custom bus and break all the existing expansion options. You saw some brief experimentation with that for the early "local bus" machines before the advent of VL-Bus, but that was quite a few years after the debut of MCA and ISA had legitimately run out of gas. EISA might have been important from the perspective of building a vendor-neutral standards process.
- nradov 5y ago
  EISA was an enabler which allowed broader growth of the whole PC market. Office LANs were just starting to become really popular. So EISA allowed a single Novell NetWare server PC to have enough bus bandwidth to run a network of cheaper ISA PCs.
- timw4mail 5y ago
  EISA was probably more important in that it lead to PCI, than the standard itself.
  - FullyFunctional 5y ago
    Amending my "crap HW" comment: PCI was a massive step forward and PCIe even more so. PCIe to me marked a turning point where PC IO could be considered enterprise-class. Obviously the CPUs had improved a lot by then with the Pentium Pro marking a milestone and the beginning of Really Good implementations. (The ISA of course remained garbage).