3 ms·

There's a lot that rings true here, but the article keeps noting that the IBM PC won partially because it was cheap. That's only true versus the examples the a

by tyingq 3y ago

There's a lot that rings true here, but the article keeps noting that the IBM PC won partially because it was cheap. That's only true versus the examples the authors cite. In the business space, it was pretty expensive when compared to, for example, business oriented Z80/CPM platforms. And it was very expensive compared to the variety of home 8-bit choices. There were a lot of different markets/niches at the time, and things changed quickly, so it's hard to distill the history into soundbites about what happened and why.

lproven 3y ago
Not quite. Firstly, re predecessors: DOS was a lot more capable than CP/M-80 and any 8-bit systems. It displaced them for much the same reasons x86-64 displaced x86-32: it became affordable to have lots of RAM. In the early 1980s, 8080/Z80 couldn't handle >64kB without clunky paging. Some 25Y later, x86-32 couldn't handle >4GB without clunky paging, in much the same way. Secondly, re the PC's cheapness. I'd argue the PC was cheap for a business machine, but it's not simply that the PC hardware was cheap, but the bigger point that the bundle of the cheap machine and the cheap OS is what won out. The PC launched with 3 OSes: PC DOS, the UCSD p-System (a self-hosted Pascal IDE based on a JVM-like environment), and DR's CP/M-86. MS-DOS was about ¼ of the price of the other offerings. DR had an amazing comeback planned: it added the multitasking of MP/M to CP/M-86, creating Concurrent CP/M, then bolted on MS-DOS emulation, to create a multitasking OS that could run and multitask MS-DOS apps on a 286: Concurrent DOS (CDOS for short). It also had a multitasking version of the GEM GUI called X/GEM. This is something even the later OS/2 1.x couldn't do, and of course OS/2 1.0 didn't have a GUI at all. But CDOS/286 depended on a feature of the development versions of the 80286 which Intel removed from the final shipping version. So, when IBM launched the first 286 PC, CDOS didn't work. Intel put the hardware feature back but it was too late: the OS had been killed at birth -- it didn't work on shipping 286 kit. Only native apps multitask. DR had a fallback plan: it promoted CDOS as a realtime OS and made a living for years afterwards, but the big product to outdo DOS, which originated as a clone of DR's CP/M anyway, was thwarted. So it's not just "the PC was cheap", no. It's bigger than that. It's: * On the business desktop, the PC was cheap, _and_ the dominant PC OS was cheap, and the PC was built from open COTS parts and ran a COTS OS so was cheap to clone. * In academia and research, UNIX on mostly-COTS hardware killed off elaborate proprietary OSes on proprietary hardware. While PCs used x86, ST-506 and then ESDI and then IDE disks, ISA slot cards, etc., workstations used fancy 32-bit CPUs on fancy buses like NuBUS, VMEbus, and so on, with SCSI storage... and later moved to RISC chips with fancy buses and SCSI. This killed off proprietary non-open non-standard OSes such as VMS, Apollo DomainOS, and other exotica. Meanwhile, in business, DOS killed DR and the p-System and all the eight-bits. Later, Windows killed all the 16-bit GUI machines, except the Mac, which only survived by self-destroying and becoming a Unix machine.
- akira2501 3y ago
  > ISA slot cards This was actually bigger than I think people remember. IBM gave away all the information on their bus standard immediately. They clearly understood they had to create a robust third party add on market for the PC and this would be key to driving the platform. They were not wrong.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    They were not wrong in terms of what had to be done to make the OC platform the dominant one, except they didn't get to profit from the PC business for too long. The openness "mistake" is what Apple fought to avoid.
    - toyg 3y ago
      And Apple almost died because of that opposition to openness. They only returned to profitability once they promised to be as open as everyone else: having intel processors and a standard Unix userland. (They then got filthy rich by effectively pivoting to portable computing, a world where openness and standardization were never essential.)
      - lmm 3y ago
        > And Apple almost died because of that opposition to openness. They only returned to profitability once they promised to be as open as everyone else: having intel processors and a standard Unix userland. Not really. The brief time when they allowed what we would now call "hackintoshes" was when they came closest to dying. They adopted intel processors for cost reasons, but went out of their way to keep their system "different". (And IIRC that was after they'd recovered to healthy profitability on the back of the iMacs and iPod)
      - qwytw 3y ago
        > They only returned to profitability once they promised to be as open as everyone else: having intel They were profitable in the early 2000s with PowerPC and they probably would've stayed on it had it remained competitive with Intel.

by tyingq 3y ago

lproven 3y ago

Not quite. Firstly, re predecessors: DOS was a lot more capable than CP/M-80 and any 8-bit systems. It displaced them for much the same reasons x86-64 displaced x86-32: it became affordable to have lots of RAM. In the early 1980s, 8080/Z80 couldn't handle >64kB without clunky paging. Some 25Y later, x86-32 couldn't handle >4GB without clunky paging, in much the same way. Secondly, re the PC's cheapness. I'd argue the PC was cheap for a business machine, but it's not simply that the PC hardware was cheap, but the bigger point that the bundle of the cheap machine and the cheap OS is what won out. The PC launched with 3 OSes: PC DOS, the UCSD p-System (a self-hosted Pascal IDE based on a JVM-like environment), and DR's CP/M-86. MS-DOS was about ¼ of the price of the other offerings. DR had an amazing comeback planned: it added the multitasking of MP/M to CP/M-86, creating Concurrent CP/M, then bolted on MS-DOS emulation, to create a multitasking OS that could run and multitask MS-DOS apps on a 286: Concurrent DOS (CDOS for short). It also had a multitasking version of the GEM GUI called X/GEM. This is something even the later OS/2 1.x couldn't do, and of course OS/2 1.0 didn't have a GUI at all. But CDOS/286 depended on a feature of the development versions of the 80286 which Intel removed from the final shipping version. So, when IBM launched the first 286 PC, CDOS didn't work. Intel put the hardware feature back but it was too late: the OS had been killed at birth -- it didn't work on shipping 286 kit. Only native apps multitask. DR had a fallback plan: it promoted CDOS as a realtime OS and made a living for years afterwards, but the big product to outdo DOS, which originated as a clone of DR's CP/M anyway, was thwarted. So it's not just "the PC was cheap", no. It's bigger than that. It's: * On the business desktop, the PC was cheap, _and_ the dominant PC OS was cheap, and the PC was built from open COTS parts and ran a COTS OS so was cheap to clone. * In academia and research, UNIX on mostly-COTS hardware killed off elaborate proprietary OSes on proprietary hardware. While PCs used x86, ST-506 and then ESDI and then IDE disks, ISA slot cards, etc., workstations used fancy 32-bit CPUs on fancy buses like NuBUS, VMEbus, and so on, with SCSI storage... and later moved to RISC chips with fancy buses and SCSI. This killed off proprietary non-open non-standard OSes such as VMS, Apollo DomainOS, and other exotica. Meanwhile, in business, DOS killed DR and the p-System and all the eight-bits. Later, Windows killed all the 16-bit GUI machines, except the Mac, which only survived by self-destroying and becoming a Unix machine.

akira2501 3y ago
> ISA slot cards This was actually bigger than I think people remember. IBM gave away all the information on their bus standard immediately. They clearly understood they had to create a robust third party add on market for the PC and this would be key to driving the platform. They were not wrong.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  They were not wrong in terms of what had to be done to make the OC platform the dominant one, except they didn't get to profit from the PC business for too long. The openness "mistake" is what Apple fought to avoid.
  - toyg 3y ago
    And Apple almost died because of that opposition to openness. They only returned to profitability once they promised to be as open as everyone else: having intel processors and a standard Unix userland. (They then got filthy rich by effectively pivoting to portable computing, a world where openness and standardization were never essential.)
    - lmm 3y ago
      > And Apple almost died because of that opposition to openness. They only returned to profitability once they promised to be as open as everyone else: having intel processors and a standard Unix userland. Not really. The brief time when they allowed what we would now call "hackintoshes" was when they came closest to dying. They adopted intel processors for cost reasons, but went out of their way to keep their system "different". (And IIRC that was after they'd recovered to healthy profitability on the back of the iMacs and iPod)
    - qwytw 3y ago
      > They only returned to profitability once they promised to be as open as everyone else: having intel They were profitable in the early 2000s with PowerPC and they probably would've stayed on it had it remained competitive with Intel.