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And they never pass the smell test. Clearly the Chairman of IBM in the 50s doesn't believe they will only ever sell 5 computers. What would be the point in in

And they never pass the smell test. Clearly the Chairman of IBM in the 50s doesn't believe they will only ever sell 5 computers. What would be the point in investing all of those resources into building anything with that sort of limit? It's obvious to anyone who understands business and takes a few seconds to consider the quote that he's likely talking about a specific product that is currently priced out of the market. The 5 in that statement is probably sourced from looking at their current clients and seeing A) who could afford such a machine and B) for which of those clients does buying the 701 make clear economic sense? The 20 companies they pitched to probably fell into category A, but they just miscalculated how many of those fell into category B. The goal was to drive down costs through economies of scale.

II2II 2y ago
I don't like the smell test because the smell test usually depends upon hindsight. Granted, I also don't like how most of these (supposed) quotes are interpreted: as a foolish lack of insight from industry leaders. Take actual IBM quote in context. Not only was the 701 a tube based machine, memory was a huge problem at the time, and computers were still being designed for business or scientific applications. The 701 was a scientific machine. It's use was pretty much limited to univiersities and military applications. It doesn't much matter wheter the number was 5 or 18 or 500, the potential market was limited. On the other hand, I doubt that IBM held similar views on machines targetted at the business market. Given how early in the history of programmable digital computers this was, it wasn't entirely clear the situation would change. That took the development of integrated circuits for both logic and memory. (The transistor may have been a prerequisite for the development of ICs, but they were insufficient for the development of computers that were accessible to anyone outside of major institutions. They were simply too expensive to reliably manufacture at scale.)

II2II 2y ago

I don't like the smell test because the smell test usually depends upon hindsight. Granted, I also don't like how most of these (supposed) quotes are interpreted: as a foolish lack of insight from industry leaders. Take actual IBM quote in context. Not only was the 701 a tube based machine, memory was a huge problem at the time, and computers were still being designed for business or scientific applications. The 701 was a scientific machine. It's use was pretty much limited to univiersities and military applications. It doesn't much matter wheter the number was 5 or 18 or 500, the potential market was limited. On the other hand, I doubt that IBM held similar views on machines targetted at the business market. Given how early in the history of programmable digital computers this was, it wasn't entirely clear the situation would change. That took the development of integrated circuits for both logic and memory. (The transistor may have been a prerequisite for the development of ICs, but they were insufficient for the development of computers that were accessible to anyone outside of major institutions. They were simply too expensive to reliably manufacture at scale.)