13 ms·

Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC

259 points by dshipper 2y ago

dreamcompiler 2y ago
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 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 2y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxXwqAm1a-Y
- ordu 2y ago
  Kyra Dempsey wrote about it. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/water-wind-and-fire-the-crash-of-delta-air-lines-flight-191-25e7375620b3 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/water-wind-and-fire-the-...
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Wow, the wiki page is nearly as good a read as the professionally written article. I broke the IBM-related text under the Passengers section out to its own paragraph, as it changes from statistics to specifics. Hopefully will remain that way.
tromp 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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.
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    Although I sometimes wonder how much survivor bias there is in these stories. How many misfit teams failed? Which is not to defend corporate hyper-control at all. But I suspect that knowing how often skunkworks projects work, and how success can be affected by different personalities and corporate contexts, might be useful information.
    - wslh 2y ago
      It is more complex than that. In some fields there was a culture of labs and special projects. IBM, Bell Labs, Xerox, and many other companies followed that route and there were corporations with a lot of bureaucracy. Good thread in /r/AskHistorians: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kxnd1/what_led_to_the_downfall_of_big_research_ie_bell/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kxnd1/what_...
  - gregw2 2y ago
    Over a decade ago, I had the chance to interact with at a startup with a Microsoft senior person who joined the firm as CTO. One piece of advice he gave stuck out: "Heroism doesn't scale" This wisdom of it was instructive (and you can see it in Estridge's early struggles with success), but so too was the sense that perhaps this "wisdom" was part of what underlay Microsoft's malaise of the late 2000s against Apple and Google (and IBM's in this story and your final comment.)
    - vmfunction 2y ago
mellosouls 2y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWrioRji60A
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- st3ve445678 2y ago
  Fantastic show, highly recommend.
  - assimpleaspossi 2y ago
    Absolutely horrible show and I advise people to not waste their time.
    - LaundroMat 2y ago
      Why is that?
      - assimpleaspossi 2y ago
        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 2y ago
        Sorry you have bad taste and don’t understand character development outside of in your face plot points ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
        AlbertCory 2y ago
nedrylandJP 2y ago
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 https://www.palmbeachschools.org/DonEstridgeMiddle
- yardie 2y ago
  Well, TIL. When I see a school named after someone who is not widely famous I assume they were an educator or politician.
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    Alonzo Mourning and his ex-wife have a North Miami HS named after them.
- stevenwoo 2y ago
  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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  I always console myself one day that New Orleans will be Miami with drinking water.
- ghaff 2y ago
  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 2y ago
>> 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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) [3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=071df104f808b8195c40643dcb4d060681742e29 https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
jes5199 2y ago
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 2y ago
  It also killed their very successful Selectric business!
figers 2y ago
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/dp/0071358927 https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Valley-Making-Personal-Computer/...
kennethrc 2y ago
> "The system would do two things. It would draw an absolutely beautiful picture of a nude lady, ..." Lena? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna)
- garius 2y ago
  I did try and find out if it was. Sadly couldn't find anything to confirm it!
- mdavid626 2y ago
  But she is not nude on this pic, right?
  - pezezin 2y ago
    The square crop used as a test image is just her face, but the original, full-page shot shows all her body, and she is very much nude.
    - mdavid626 2y ago
      I see, thank you for this tip.
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  Probably monochrome for the very first prototype.
zabzonk 2y ago
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.
- rvense 2y ago
  I'd never heard of this, but it's in the article, too. I think the tech world would have looked very different if Estridge had taken over instead of Sculley.
nabla9 2y ago
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 2y ago
  keyboard wasn't great either, to begin with!
  - nabla9 2y ago
    Model M keyboards are ridiculously good. They are consistent for every key, have great tactile feedback and are extremely durable.
    - cgh 2y ago
      The Model M did not appear until 1985, nearly four years after the original IBM PC.
      - nikau 2y ago
        Model F came out in 81 with same bucking springs
        shiroiushi 2y ago
        The Model F sucked. The key mechanism was fantastic, but the layout was utter trash. The weird return key that's long vertically but has a one-key-sized raised section in the middle is the worst part of it. You can buy brand-new keyboards with this mechanism now from some small business (sorry, don't have a link handy), but even they offer Model M-like layouts because the original Model F layout is so awful. The only good thing I can say about the Model F layout is that almost all microcomputers at that time had terrible keyboards, though the reasons they were terrible varied. Compared to junk like the Atari computer keyboards, it probably seemed great, though of course the IBM PC was far more expensive. For really great keyboards, at that time, you had to look at the business-level terminal keyboards and such.
deater 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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 2y ago
      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-computers-skirted-ibms-patents-and-gave-rise-to-eisa/ https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-comp...
AlbertCory 2y ago
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 2y ago
  One of the biggest advantages of being young is still not knowing how real this can be.
- doubloon 2y ago
  thats why you dont take credit for anything
forgotmypw17 2y ago
https://archive.ph/4MbcF https://archive.ph/4MbcF
ghaff 2y ago
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.
drumdance 2y ago
In 1981 my sister was just out of college and worked on the PC as her first job. She said the loss of Estridge was devastating, and IBM changed some of their policies around executives traveling together because of it.
KerrAvon 2y ago
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 2y ago
The end of this article is so beautifully written it made me tear up
doubloon 2y ago
well in the long run the naysayers were right. the personal PC business is strewn with dead companies scrounging for pennies. it is basically a loss leader. FAANG - which one of those make PCs? oh right, none of them except Apple which has like a 1 percent PC market share which is used to make apps and videos for phones. my favorite screwdriver shop (PC parts, cases, cpus, fans, etc) just closed. one of the last in the city. decline in business.
aspenmayer 2y ago
This is the first time I've heard someone refer to DEC as "Digital." Is that an Australian quirk? Not that it's wrong, as it is part of the name and could likely be a regional expression and/or historically accurate, and in any case it's before my time in the industry. > but was yet to announce he was gay (took another decade) I don't know why this detail was included; not that it's anything to be ashamed of. It just doesn't seem relevant at all to the other points you have raised, and seems a bit insensitive or judgemental imo.
- p_l 2y ago
  It's a Digital thing. IIRC, the company itself promoted the use of "Digital" rather than "DEC", with the latter being accident of funding availability when it was founded.
- spacechild1 2y ago
  Ha! I had no idea what parent meant with 'Digital', thanks for clearing things up :)
- contingencies 2y ago
  PC shutdowns have no place on HN, we deal in facts. It was included because I personally felt that it was an interesting historic tidbit... especially since he'd flipped from suit to flip-flops and commercial unix to Linux, but still kept this secret. No doubt in those days executives with career plans probably had to keep such things unknown. Can't comment on Digital analogues. Re. classic PC shutdown emotive, character mud-slinging focused response below, check again: I did not state an opinion, I did exactly the opposite. Unsure what you think you are "calling me out" on - all I expressed was a (very public) fact[0] (furthermore, about which discussion has been intentionally invited), and when questioned, expressed the purpose for doing so was an interest in sharing that fact for others, since it is historically notable with respect to distinction from the current era. If my interest in sharing is now a matter subject to your offense, feel free to be offended, but don't post about it. [0] https://www.linux-magazine.com/content/view/full/55727 https://www.linux-magazine.com/content/view/full/55727
  - 2y ago
djmips 2y ago
A lot of the time, I really am turned off by these articles in short story form but this one flows well. Good job author!

259 points by dshipper 2y ago

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 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 2y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxXwqAm1a-Y
ordu 2y ago
Kyra Dempsey wrote about it. https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/water-wind-and-fire-the-crash-of-delta-air-lines-flight-191-25e7375620b3 https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/water-wind-and-fire-the-...
mixmastamyk 2y ago
Wow, the wiki page is nearly as good a read as the professionally written article. I broke the IBM-related text under the Passengers section out to its own paragraph, as it changes from statistics to specifics. Hopefully will remain that way.

tromp 2y ago

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 2y ago
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.
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  Although I sometimes wonder how much survivor bias there is in these stories. How many misfit teams failed? Which is not to defend corporate hyper-control at all. But I suspect that knowing how often skunkworks projects work, and how success can be affected by different personalities and corporate contexts, might be useful information.
  - wslh 2y ago
    It is more complex than that. In some fields there was a culture of labs and special projects. IBM, Bell Labs, Xerox, and many other companies followed that route and there were corporations with a lot of bureaucracy. Good thread in /r/AskHistorians: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kxnd1/what_led_to_the_downfall_of_big_research_ie_bell/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kxnd1/what_...
- gregw2 2y ago
  Over a decade ago, I had the chance to interact with at a startup with a Microsoft senior person who joined the firm as CTO. One piece of advice he gave stuck out: "Heroism doesn't scale" This wisdom of it was instructive (and you can see it in Estridge's early struggles with success), but so too was the sense that perhaps this "wisdom" was part of what underlay Microsoft's malaise of the late 2000s against Apple and Google (and IBM's in this story and your final comment.)
  - vmfunction 2y ago

mellosouls 2y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWrioRji60A

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
st3ve445678 2y ago
Fantastic show, highly recommend.
- assimpleaspossi 2y ago
  Absolutely horrible show and I advise people to not waste their time.
  - LaundroMat 2y ago
    Why is that?
    - assimpleaspossi 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        Sorry you have bad taste and don’t understand character development outside of in your face plot points ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      - AlbertCory 2y ago

nedrylandJP 2y ago

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 https://www.palmbeachschools.org/DonEstridgeMiddle

yardie 2y ago
Well, TIL. When I see a school named after someone who is not widely famous I assume they were an educator or politician.
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  Alonzo Mourning and his ex-wife have a North Miami HS named after them.
stevenwoo 2y ago
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 2y ago

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 2y ago
I always console myself one day that New Orleans will be Miami with drinking water.
ghaff 2y ago
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 2y ago

>> 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 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) [3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=071df104f808b8195c40643dcb4d060681742e29 https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

jes5199 2y ago

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 2y ago
It also killed their very successful Selectric business!

figers 2y ago

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/dp/0071358927 https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Valley-Making-Personal-Computer/...

kennethrc 2y ago

> "The system would do two things. It would draw an absolutely beautiful picture of a nude lady, ..." Lena? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna)

garius 2y ago
I did try and find out if it was. Sadly couldn't find anything to confirm it!
mdavid626 2y ago
But she is not nude on this pic, right?
- pezezin 2y ago
  The square crop used as a test image is just her face, but the original, full-page shot shows all her body, and she is very much nude.
  - mdavid626 2y ago
    I see, thank you for this tip.
mixmastamyk 2y ago
Probably monochrome for the very first prototype.

zabzonk 2y ago

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.

rvense 2y ago
I'd never heard of this, but it's in the article, too. I think the tech world would have looked very different if Estridge had taken over instead of Sculley.

nabla9 2y ago

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 2y ago
keyboard wasn't great either, to begin with!
- nabla9 2y ago
  Model M keyboards are ridiculously good. They are consistent for every key, have great tactile feedback and are extremely durable.
  - cgh 2y ago
    The Model M did not appear until 1985, nearly four years after the original IBM PC.
    - nikau 2y ago
      Model F came out in 81 with same bucking springs
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        The Model F sucked. The key mechanism was fantastic, but the layout was utter trash. The weird return key that's long vertically but has a one-key-sized raised section in the middle is the worst part of it. You can buy brand-new keyboards with this mechanism now from some small business (sorry, don't have a link handy), but even they offer Model M-like layouts because the original Model F layout is so awful. The only good thing I can say about the Model F layout is that almost all microcomputers at that time had terrible keyboards, though the reasons they were terrible varied. Compared to junk like the Atari computer keyboards, it probably seemed great, though of course the IBM PC was far more expensive. For really great keyboards, at that time, you had to look at the business-level terminal keyboards and such.

deater 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
    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-computers-skirted-ibms-patents-and-gave-rise-to-eisa/ https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-comp...

AlbertCory 2y ago

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 2y ago
One of the biggest advantages of being young is still not knowing how real this can be.
doubloon 2y ago
thats why you dont take credit for anything

forgotmypw17 2y ago

https://archive.ph/4MbcF https://archive.ph/4MbcF

ghaff 2y ago

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.

drumdance 2y ago

In 1981 my sister was just out of college and worked on the PC as her first job. She said the loss of Estridge was devastating, and IBM changed some of their policies around executives traveling together because of it.

KerrAvon 2y ago

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 2y ago

The end of this article is so beautifully written it made me tear up

doubloon 2y ago

well in the long run the naysayers were right. the personal PC business is strewn with dead companies scrounging for pennies. it is basically a loss leader. FAANG - which one of those make PCs? oh right, none of them except Apple which has like a 1 percent PC market share which is used to make apps and videos for phones. my favorite screwdriver shop (PC parts, cases, cpus, fans, etc) just closed. one of the last in the city. decline in business.

aspenmayer 2y ago

This is the first time I've heard someone refer to DEC as "Digital." Is that an Australian quirk? Not that it's wrong, as it is part of the name and could likely be a regional expression and/or historically accurate, and in any case it's before my time in the industry. > but was yet to announce he was gay (took another decade) I don't know why this detail was included; not that it's anything to be ashamed of. It just doesn't seem relevant at all to the other points you have raised, and seems a bit insensitive or judgemental imo.

p_l 2y ago
It's a Digital thing. IIRC, the company itself promoted the use of "Digital" rather than "DEC", with the latter being accident of funding availability when it was founded.
spacechild1 2y ago
Ha! I had no idea what parent meant with 'Digital', thanks for clearing things up :)
contingencies 2y ago
PC shutdowns have no place on HN, we deal in facts. It was included because I personally felt that it was an interesting historic tidbit... especially since he'd flipped from suit to flip-flops and commercial unix to Linux, but still kept this secret. No doubt in those days executives with career plans probably had to keep such things unknown. Can't comment on Digital analogues. Re. classic PC shutdown emotive, character mud-slinging focused response below, check again: I did not state an opinion, I did exactly the opposite. Unsure what you think you are "calling me out" on - all I expressed was a (very public) fact[0] (furthermore, about which discussion has been intentionally invited), and when questioned, expressed the purpose for doing so was an interest in sharing that fact for others, since it is historically notable with respect to distinction from the current era. If my interest in sharing is now a matter subject to your offense, feel free to be offended, but don't post about it. [0] https://www.linux-magazine.com/content/view/full/55727 https://www.linux-magazine.com/content/view/full/55727
- 2y ago

djmips 2y ago

A lot of the time, I really am turned off by these articles in short story form but this one flows well. Good job author!