13 ms·

The PC was never a true 'IBMer'

78 points by klelatti 1y ago

rbanffy 1y ago
> First, IBM didn’t make the most of its dominance. It did little to make the IBM version of the PC truly unique. Remember IBM had gone through a very painful antitrust case and was still subject to the consent decree. I’m not sure right now of the terms, but it certainly limited the leverages IBM could apply against third parties profiting from the PC.
- epc 1y ago
  There was still an antitrust case in process against IBM in 1981 when the PC was launched, it would only be dropped by the US in 1982. I started in 1990 and the fear of another antitrust case pervaded everything through the ten years I was there, even after the earlier consent decree expired.
SMAAART 1y ago
> IBM brought the quality of it’s support and it’s endorsement as a personal computer that was worthy of ‘serious’ businesses. *its *its
- pessimizer 1y ago
  It's only "it's" if it is "it is." If it is not "it is," it's "its." ----- Or to be clear (lol), 1) The possessive of "it" is "its." 2) "It's" is a contraction of "it is."
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > 2) "It's" is a contraction of "it is." ... or "it has". -- EDIT: I find it much easier to remember that "its" is (only) the possesive pronoun.
xolve 1y ago
Thank the fate for PC to exist! Open nature of PC allowed for truly free/open source software to exist which can be functional without big corporate lockdown. I can fully assemble it with parts I can buy individually and as long as they are compatible (which is mentioned on the box, no hidden knowledge here) I can expect it to work within the mentioned warranty. My PC based computers can be booted and fully functional with Debain, Fedora and (put your favorite Linux, BSD distro here mine is openSUSE Tumbleweed). There is no parallel ecosystem which yet, which rivals PC in terms of open specs and fully tinkerable hardware and software. Macbooks are locked down with Apple and forget about your own hardware. Android seemed like a competitor, but closed nature of its development and lack commodity hardware around ARM based phones means that FOSS layer exists only in user bases apps. We have custom ROMs which require bootable blobs from vendors and its non-reliable and breaks often.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Just wait for the PC ARM to take off as the anti-x86 keeps cheerleading, how open do you think it will remain?
  - MiddleEndian 1y ago
    lol I remember years ago, people complained so much about "Wintel." And while I'm currently in the Linux+AMD camp, Intel and Windows are still far more open than any ARM+Android/iOS/anything world
  - api 1y ago
    The market is already full of ARM development boards that are pretty powerful. Just need to scale these up and put some real power on them. Put something with the power of an M series or a Graviton on these and you have the start of a great ARM PC market. There's nothing inherently not-open about ARM, or at least it's no less open by nature than x86. The fact that most ARM devices are locked down is a secondary effect from most of them being phones. RISC-V would be more open than either of these but it still lags on performance. I have a RISC-V board but it's kind of slow. Not terrible but wouldn't make a good PC for anything but basic uses.
jmclnx 1y ago
>I don’t think that culturally IBM ever really felt that the PC was a true IBM product. That was true everywhere. I worked at a mini company at the time when the PC came out. People in that company looked at the PC as a cool thing, but not a real computer. In 10 or so years, the PC killed of almost all mini computer companies. Some even speculated that was the main reason for IBM to create the PC :)
- pjmlp 1y ago
  They were also clever being on the first line supporting Linux back in the 2000's. Nowadays not only they own one of the few UNIX proper left standing, they also own everything Red-Hat contributes for.
pjmlp 1y ago
PC only got where it was thanks to the mistakes that made clones possible. Everyone else, including other IBM offerings, were all about vertical integration. It is no coincidence that nowadays with PC desktops being largely left to enthusiastics and gamers, OEMs are all doubling down on vertical integration across laptops and mobile devices, as means to recoup the thin margins that have come to be.
- keyringlight 1y ago
  I think the big change over the past 17 years has been the app stores (and on the less 'personal' computer side businesses will be on support contracts), the from the manufacturers point of view hardware and software is a loss leader to try and funnel users to where they do as much computer related commerce through their middle-man. In some ways it's an evolution of bundling software where that would be another source of income.
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    That is certainly part of it.
    - thw_9a83c 1y ago
      > I think the big change over the past 17 years has been the app stores And also cloud applications, which are useless without the harder-to-clone data center part.
- thw_9a83c 1y ago
  The original IBM PC was proprietary only in its BIOS. It was a mistake IBM regretted very soon and tried to fix with an PS/2 architecture, MCA bus, and even OS/2 operating system. But Microsoft and the companies that made PC clones did everything to keep this "mistake" alive. In fact, the openness of the PC platform is a historical accident. Other proprietary personal computer manufacturers (like Apple, Commodore and Atari) also never planned to create an open platform either. The closest thing was the 8-bit MSX platform, which was a Microsoft thing for the Japanese market, and it was very soon outdated.
cmrdporcupine 1y ago
IBM tried to make a more thoroughly "IBM" proprietary PC product first with the PCjr and then especially with the PS/2. Attempted to lock down the hardware a bit more, introduced the Microchannel bus/architecture, etc. But it was too late, and they didn't have the power they thought they had.
- blargthorwars 1y ago
  They nerfed the PCjr with a horrid keyboard to keep the office people from buying it. This is a shame, as it had better color graphics, and we had to wait for XGA (or Tandy 1000) to get better color.
paulajohnson 1y ago
This reads like a case study from "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen. TL;DR: big incumbents (e.g. IBM) get out-innovated and replaced by scrappy startups even when the incumbent sees it coming and tries to react. The incumbent's business processes, sales metrics (NPII in this story), internal culture and established customer base make it impossible for an innovative product to succeed within the company. The incumbent produces an innovative gadget. It may even be good, but its Sales Dept earn their quarterly bonus from the existing product line sold to the existing customers. They haven't got time to go chasing small orders of the new gadget from new customers who they don't have a relationship with, and the existing customers don't see the point of the new gadget. So orders for the gadget stagnate. Across town is the small scrappy start-up making a similar gadget. It lives on those small orders and has a highly motivated sales person who chases those orders full time. So their orders grow, their product improves from the market feedback, and one day the new gadget is actually better than the incumbent's main product. At that point the incumbent goes out of business.
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  IBM didn't create an innovative product though. If you look at the era, there were dozens of machines of a similar style on the market, either z80 or 8080, 8088, even 8086... but they ran CP/M. PC-DOS was effectively a kind of fork / rip-off of DR's CP/M, but clean room and customized for 8086. IBM created a rather generic machine using off the shelf components, and someone else's operating system. Innovation factor was almost zero. The only advantage it had was it had IBM's name on it, and IBM was still a Really Big Deal then. It brought "respectability" to a thing that before was still a weird subculture.
  - NetMageSCW 1y ago
    I don’t know, I think the concept of a BIOS with a documented API and the included minimal component set (e.g. serial port, parallel port) raised the bar on what third party software could assume existed and could be accessed over the existing 8-bit computers if the time.
    - 1y ago
chuckadams 1y ago
> First, IBM didn’t make the most of its dominance. It did little to make the IBM version of the PC truly unique. They tried, in the form of the previously mentioned PS/2. They just squeezed a little too hard. There was also the PCjr, which was riddled with enough technical flaws at a blistering price point for it to also end up a flop (Charlie Chaplin was also not exactly a great choice to sell to a market already trending younger). IBM might have eventually gotten it right, they just lost the will to keep trying. Their business model depended on landing corporate whales buying high-margin products and services; mere commodities were a plebeian concern beneath them.
- blargthorwars 1y ago
  I'm glad we have a word now for Charlie Chaplin misfire: Cringe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LR1Xvvch18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LR1Xvvch18
  - glhaynes 1y ago
    I'm not sure it was a misfire — I remember those ads as being pretty popular and having big mindshare. But that was certainly just my small perspective of the times.
    - chuckadams 1y ago
      I remember eyebrows being raised even at the time over the Chaplin ads, but I suppose they're memorable enough even today that they couldn't have been all that off the mark. Certainly wasn't the worst of the missteps around the PCjr (and I'd forgotten they ran the same flavor of ads for the PC AT, which was a fine machine!)
      - theologic 1y ago
        Externally, it was universally praised. I was selling PC gray market at the time, and it was highly effective. The only people that I knew that had a problem with it was certain IBMers that felt it didn't rep the Blue Channel (corporate sales) and our corporate PCs. However, as the IBM sales took off, I met anybody inside of IBM when I eventually got there that said, "Well that stupid campaign we had...."
Lu2025 1y ago
> I don’t think that culturally IBM ever really felt that the PC was a true IBM product This makes perfect sense. In the early 2010s I worked with what remained of IBM development and was surprised at the dysfunction, complete lack of manufacturing culture and engineering approaches. I couldn't believe that this culture could produce a successful product. Guess what, it actually didn't.
- leoc 1y ago
  IBM wasn’t that hopeless, at least not so early. It produced some fairly successful and well-regarded products in the ‘80s and ‘90s like the POWER architecture, the AS/400, and updates to its mainframe line.
- thedougd 1y ago
  2010's would have been too late to see those things. Wrt PCs, the PC company sale was complete and IIRC Lenovo was no longer even sharing space with IBM.
- wpm 1y ago
  I’m sure the IBM of the 2010s bore little resemblance to the engineering culture that gave them the reputation that made the 5150 as important as it was.
- theologic 1y ago
  The PC group was sold to Lenovo in 2005. What group did you work with and where?
divbzero 1y ago
I find it sad that IBM didn’t view ThinkPad as a core business and chose to sell it instead. They made some of the best laptops at the time.
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  Margins on consumer PC hardware are quite low, and were really low through the late 90s. There was no point being in that market for them, and they made a pivot to switch to only two markets: services (IBM Global Services is huge still) and mainframe customers (which I gather they must still make a lot of money on, and the hardware is actually quite interesting and well-engineered, just stupid expensive). I'm surprised Db2 still exists as a product they actively develop, to be honest. Maybe because their services branch and mainframe customers still use it heavily.
manithree 1y ago
Having lived through all this, I highly recommend "The Crazy Ones" blog from Gareth Edwards. https://every.to/the-crazy-ones https://every.to/the-crazy-ones The blog on Don Estridge covers IBM's place in PC history in fascinating and extensive detail. Mr. Edwards also reminded me what a debt Linux users owe to Rod Canion for making the gang of 9 and open hardware a reality.
Theodores 1y ago
Can anyone remember when IBM made their own clones? Ambra? They had very unusual mice but I never saw one in the wild. The sale to Lenovo went very well, when compared to how most mergers, acquisitions and consolidations went in the period. I can't remember Lenovo from before the acquisition and, again, I can't remember seeing any pre-Thinkpad Lenovo machines.
- theologic 1y ago
  I was there. Ambra was an attempt to: 1. Get out from the blue tax 2. Have and alternative procurement path 3. Set up a channel where we might not cannibalize ourselves. 4. Free outselves from some of our rigorous engineering processes It was basically a fail fast experiment, which is popular today. It was set up with the thought process that we wanted it more virtual and not to disrupt the core business. It became obvious pretty quick that it brought its own set of risks, and so we moved into Aptiva. It is good to try and fail and get out. Actually, the Lenovo acquisition was a bit of a war. There was some visionary leadership from the most senior level of Lenovo that saw the core USA as extremely valuable, and allowed them to win arguments. While their long term goal was to move the core to China, they were careful to make sure they kept a lot of the USA team engaged, and many key USA individuals did move or travel constantly to China. However, I wasn't a part of the company when it was sold, so most of this is top level feedback from my friends that did go.
  - Theodores 1y ago
    Thanks for chiming in. I vaguely remember the press trolling IBM for Aptiva too. Where were the Ambra machines sourced? Were they special clones like Compaq (where the BIOS was different), decent commodity clones like Dell or were they generic clones like everything off-brand? I never understood what the value proposition was. Was it a bit like a supermarket own brand where the customer kind-of guesses that the brand leader makes them, much like how Americans know CostCo Kirkland diapers are made by Huggies?
    - theologic 1y ago
      The value prop is that we could launch a Dell (Gateway) channel by offering leading edge systems, and look for unique features, and live in the other guys holes. The team wasn't stupid, and they had a matrix of where they felt that they could put some products into the ecosystem that could occupy some space that Dell (Gateway) didn't have clear products. If I remember correctly, there was also some thought that we could cut off Dell in EMEA. (Europe.) Dell was far stronger in the USA at the time. Being this is 30 years ago, I can't remember an exact matrix on some that wasn't my core product. But they had a strategy. This was early in my career, but I happened to be in a pivotable position that got me access above my pay grade. (I have this weird background in both marketing and engineering, and as somebody that can speak both, I turned into basically a language translator in many meetings, then I was sent out as PR person to the magazines.) I did not work for the Ambra team, but they had an impact on my work, so I got to be involved a enough to see the edges. I'm not going to have the exact numbers, but I remember that we stated that we were going to have no more than 8 IBMers involved with the thing. The Taiwanese clone market was just starting to take off, and we were starting to outsource to Taiwan. If I remember correctly, it was the Phoenix BIOS, who we had already done a deal with for our Consumer PC line. (Actually, it was co-development.) As I already wrote, the final bit is that the guys had done some anonymous bid work, and had gotten some very aggressive bids--better than what we were getting. So, they had the impression that they could take a lot of cost out of the system. Also, we wanted to take out Dell and Gateway, but not impact the core IBM brand. Compaq was considered the real comp. HP second. Dell was this annoying "can't stop them because they always win the bids" company. Gateway was on the fringe, and more of a threat to our consumer brand, which was small at the time. But it was free TAM. So, there was an impression if we followed the Dell/Gateway model, leading tech, very competitive pricing, and full page ads, with some systems that lived in the space, we could start to cannibalize the their TAM. Now, you don't want to read back into history. The Dell then is not the Dell of now. But, buying behavior was stronger with Dell than the group anticipated. It just was tough to get the velocity growth they wanted. I think we launched in EMEA first, maybe because that is where the VP that ran the thing was from, and then it was rolled out in the USA. However, it just did not see the growth, and I remember there were some quality issues that the small group couldn't handle, but this is pretty foggy. I will also state that the Round Rock team (and even Gateway), was incredibly tough competition in this arena. I would say that the team did not appreciate this. However, it was never a massive corporate push for RTP--the home of the PC and PC Server. It was a "let's try this and see if we can learn something." I do remember most of us in the core PC team to NOT get involved as it wasn't pitched as being our core business. If I remember correctly, we did help share some information on parts that we procured to help them. Its not Costco as the models are so different. As I have run a distribution business before, and Costco is really a marvel to me. My disti business was to the VAR channel, but my sister group used Costco and Walmart. Costco is absolute maniac about delivering value to their customers with quality. Really, it blows me away. They had a bunch of brands, and Sinegal said they could combine them all under Kirkland, turn it into a quality brand to drag up the entire Costco brand. He is so freaking brilliant, and I would argue unique to a company that had a distribution business that wanted to position themselves in the consumer's mind. I would argue that Costco never used their branding to indicate a "secret way" to get a better brand. I think that Costco is keen on making sure that Kirkland IS the brand, which is different than Ambra. Thanks for asking. I don't think we ever did this type of post mortem at the time, and thinking through events always seems to generate learning for myself as I type it down.
amelius 1y ago
The real "Personal Computer" is of course the smartphone.
- arminiusreturns 1y ago
  No, because it became a locked down ecosystem that is user-hostile and not user-controllable. I realized this when I observed the younger generation, who I thought would be much better than us at computing, who had not a clue how anything worked because they never had the ability, need, or desire to tinker with the underlying systems, with only rare exceptions (roms, etc).
  - amelius 1y ago
    You are right, in a way. But losing your smartphone is like losing all your personal information. In that sense it is a personal computer.
    - hulitu 1y ago
      > In that sense it is a personal computer. No it is a "personal", but not "computer".
      - amelius 1y ago
        Not a general purpose computer, but still a computer.
    - AngryData 1y ago
      Depends on your lifestyle and location. The only thing I use my cellphone for is text messaging and looking at wikipedia or part numbers when im not at home. It is definitely useful, but 95% of my computer work is still done on a PC.
- spankibalt 1y ago
  A smartphone (-like device) has indeed the potential to be an ultramobile general-purpose personal computer. Sadly, virtually all of them don't reach that potential.
theologic 1y ago
It's always interesting to see these types of articles with a bunch of people pontificating about what was or wasn't happening at IBM. I started my career at IBM and had the chance to engage with the Boca Raton group and the PC division there, working as an internal supplier within IBM. The idea that the PC Group was somehow destroyed by "antibodies" is ridiculous on its face—this notion is often spoken by people who have no real background with the group or a true understanding of what was going on. As Patrick Lencioni has often said, we have things reported as strategy, when it turns out to be people issues. A lot of what happened at IBM only makes sense if you were there. I'll list some things here, though since I'm late to the conversation, I’m not sure how much it will be observed. However, perhaps an IBMer who was with the PC Company will come across this and add a few more alternatives or supporting facts. 1. IBM was a wildly diverse place culturally. We had almost half a million employees worldwide. As with any large corporation, you could find divergent views—anyone could find a person or two to support anything they wanted to claim about the company. However, the PC division was generally well regarded. Sure, you can find somebody who said something about "antibodies", but you can find a lot more who would say that’s ridiculous. I tend more toward the latter than the former. 2. Don Estridge was a bit of a cowboy. He did love being down in Florida, which gave him the ability to move quickly. Still, I would say IBM allowed for its “wild ducks”, and while the PC group was one of the more obvious successes, it was not IBM’s only success. Estridge died in a well-publicized airplane accident at Dallas Fort Worth. I don't think most people understand how much cultural impact this had on the group. Although it could be debated, I do believe we could say it was as if Bill Gates or Steve Jobs had been taken out of their company. The amazing thing about the PC group is that it didn’t collapse after his death. 3. The single most destructive thing IBM did was thinking they could take the PC group out of Boca and transport it to Research Triangle Park. After it moved to RTP, I got to work there with many of the group’s core members. They consistently described how the move was traumatic to virtually every aspect of a team that was truly world-class. (Another issue: There was also a development decision in Boca that some decried—some forward-thinking was shelved—but I wasn’t heavily involved in that, and it wasn’t so universal.) 4. I was in the midst of the turmoil as IBM reached the midlife of the PC in RTP. By that stage, we had given up on the idea of clear, proprietary closed systems. Yet at the same time, we were doing some excellent engineering and marketing—we were finally winning awards from PC magazines for the desktops, and people already loved our laptops. But we were clearly hamstrung. Without going deep into details, it’s clear in today’s economy that certain business units serve different purposes. The PC Division was expected to make a lot of money while paying what was internally called “the blue tax.” In other words, corporate hit us with effective tax rates and metrics that basically made it impossible to compete with Compaq or Dell. What most people don’t realize is that one of the biggest impacts of selling the group to Lenovo was the removal of the blue tax. Many key U.S. development team members stayed with the company, and though Lenovo was committed to eventually moving true development headquarters to China, it would have collapsed without an incredibly dedicated group of IBMers who were unfailingly unselfish. There was something about the culture—dedication to the team was one of the most important things you could do, even after the group had been sold to Lenovo. On reflection, if Estridge never died, and if the division had never moved from Boca, the computing industry would be very different as being apart of what happened.
musicale 1y ago
> Because IBM’s BIOS was soon reverse engineered Someone might also have read the BIOS source code listing that IBM provided: https://archive.org/details/IBMPCIBM5150TechnicalReference6322507APR84/page/5-29/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/IBMPCIBM5150TechnicalReference63...
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Anyone doing that was tainted due to copyright law.
  - musicale 1y ago
    As you indicate, in clean-room design the implementation is done by a different team from those who examined the original system and wrote the spec (which is vetted): > Typically, a clean-room design is done by having someone examine the system to be reimplemented and having this person write a specification. This specification is then reviewed by a lawyer to ensure that no copyrighted material is included. The specification is then implemented by a team with no connection to the original examiners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design The article above makes some interesting points about whether clean-room design is actually necessary.
jecel 1y ago
"IBM had no moat around the PC." is true about the original PC and XT, but they did have 7 patents on the AT. After the PS/2 attempt didn't work out, their lawyers spent the first half of the 1990s going after the chipset makers and the second half of the 1990s getting clone makers themselves to license these patents (along with some other unrelated ones that weren't about to expire). A quick search showed it isn't easy to find online version of these patents (because IBM has so many that even knowing these are from 1984 didn't help), but I remember that one was related to being able to split a screen into a graphics and a text part in their EGA board (though the Apple II previously did this too, but with a fixed split), one was about detecting 360KB vs 1.2MB floppy drives by seeking to track 60 and then stepping back 59 tracks and checking if we were now at track 0 (not unlike how the Apple II handled the lack of a track 0 signal, but for a different purpose), one was for the "bus master" signal in the PC AT (later ISA) bus and I can't seem to remember the other four but they were all similar in style. So in the late 1990s you had to pay IBM if you wanted to make a PC clone (AT and up, but 8088 clones had died out in the early 1990s).

78 points by klelatti 1y ago

> First, IBM didn’t make the most of its dominance. It did little to make the IBM version of the PC truly unique. Remember IBM had gone through a very painful antitrust case and was still subject to the consent decree. I’m not sure right now of the terms, but it certainly limited the leverages IBM could apply against third parties profiting from the PC.

epc 1y ago
There was still an antitrust case in process against IBM in 1981 when the PC was launched, it would only be dropped by the US in 1982. I started in 1990 and the fear of another antitrust case pervaded everything through the ten years I was there, even after the earlier consent decree expired.

SMAAART 1y ago

> IBM brought the quality of it’s support and it’s endorsement as a personal computer that was worthy of ‘serious’ businesses. *its *its

pessimizer 1y ago
It's only "it's" if it is "it is." If it is not "it is," it's "its." ----- Or to be clear (lol), 1) The possessive of "it" is "its." 2) "It's" is a contraction of "it is."
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > 2) "It's" is a contraction of "it is." ... or "it has". -- EDIT: I find it much easier to remember that "its" is (only) the possesive pronoun.

xolve 1y ago

Thank the fate for PC to exist! Open nature of PC allowed for truly free/open source software to exist which can be functional without big corporate lockdown. I can fully assemble it with parts I can buy individually and as long as they are compatible (which is mentioned on the box, no hidden knowledge here) I can expect it to work within the mentioned warranty. My PC based computers can be booted and fully functional with Debain, Fedora and (put your favorite Linux, BSD distro here mine is openSUSE Tumbleweed). There is no parallel ecosystem which yet, which rivals PC in terms of open specs and fully tinkerable hardware and software. Macbooks are locked down with Apple and forget about your own hardware. Android seemed like a competitor, but closed nature of its development and lack commodity hardware around ARM based phones means that FOSS layer exists only in user bases apps. We have custom ROMs which require bootable blobs from vendors and its non-reliable and breaks often.

pjmlp 1y ago
Just wait for the PC ARM to take off as the anti-x86 keeps cheerleading, how open do you think it will remain?
- MiddleEndian 1y ago
  lol I remember years ago, people complained so much about "Wintel." And while I'm currently in the Linux+AMD camp, Intel and Windows are still far more open than any ARM+Android/iOS/anything world
- api 1y ago
  The market is already full of ARM development boards that are pretty powerful. Just need to scale these up and put some real power on them. Put something with the power of an M series or a Graviton on these and you have the start of a great ARM PC market. There's nothing inherently not-open about ARM, or at least it's no less open by nature than x86. The fact that most ARM devices are locked down is a secondary effect from most of them being phones. RISC-V would be more open than either of these but it still lags on performance. I have a RISC-V board but it's kind of slow. Not terrible but wouldn't make a good PC for anything but basic uses.

jmclnx 1y ago

>I don’t think that culturally IBM ever really felt that the PC was a true IBM product. That was true everywhere. I worked at a mini company at the time when the PC came out. People in that company looked at the PC as a cool thing, but not a real computer. In 10 or so years, the PC killed of almost all mini computer companies. Some even speculated that was the main reason for IBM to create the PC :)

pjmlp 1y ago
They were also clever being on the first line supporting Linux back in the 2000's. Nowadays not only they own one of the few UNIX proper left standing, they also own everything Red-Hat contributes for.

pjmlp 1y ago

PC only got where it was thanks to the mistakes that made clones possible. Everyone else, including other IBM offerings, were all about vertical integration. It is no coincidence that nowadays with PC desktops being largely left to enthusiastics and gamers, OEMs are all doubling down on vertical integration across laptops and mobile devices, as means to recoup the thin margins that have come to be.

keyringlight 1y ago
I think the big change over the past 17 years has been the app stores (and on the less 'personal' computer side businesses will be on support contracts), the from the manufacturers point of view hardware and software is a loss leader to try and funnel users to where they do as much computer related commerce through their middle-man. In some ways it's an evolution of bundling software where that would be another source of income.
- pjmlp 1y ago
  That is certainly part of it.
  - thw_9a83c 1y ago
    > I think the big change over the past 17 years has been the app stores And also cloud applications, which are useless without the harder-to-clone data center part.
thw_9a83c 1y ago
The original IBM PC was proprietary only in its BIOS. It was a mistake IBM regretted very soon and tried to fix with an PS/2 architecture, MCA bus, and even OS/2 operating system. But Microsoft and the companies that made PC clones did everything to keep this "mistake" alive. In fact, the openness of the PC platform is a historical accident. Other proprietary personal computer manufacturers (like Apple, Commodore and Atari) also never planned to create an open platform either. The closest thing was the 8-bit MSX platform, which was a Microsoft thing for the Japanese market, and it was very soon outdated.

cmrdporcupine 1y ago

IBM tried to make a more thoroughly "IBM" proprietary PC product first with the PCjr and then especially with the PS/2. Attempted to lock down the hardware a bit more, introduced the Microchannel bus/architecture, etc. But it was too late, and they didn't have the power they thought they had.

blargthorwars 1y ago
They nerfed the PCjr with a horrid keyboard to keep the office people from buying it. This is a shame, as it had better color graphics, and we had to wait for XGA (or Tandy 1000) to get better color.

paulajohnson 1y ago

This reads like a case study from "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen. TL;DR: big incumbents (e.g. IBM) get out-innovated and replaced by scrappy startups even when the incumbent sees it coming and tries to react. The incumbent's business processes, sales metrics (NPII in this story), internal culture and established customer base make it impossible for an innovative product to succeed within the company. The incumbent produces an innovative gadget. It may even be good, but its Sales Dept earn their quarterly bonus from the existing product line sold to the existing customers. They haven't got time to go chasing small orders of the new gadget from new customers who they don't have a relationship with, and the existing customers don't see the point of the new gadget. So orders for the gadget stagnate. Across town is the small scrappy start-up making a similar gadget. It lives on those small orders and has a highly motivated sales person who chases those orders full time. So their orders grow, their product improves from the market feedback, and one day the new gadget is actually better than the incumbent's main product. At that point the incumbent goes out of business.

cmrdporcupine 1y ago
IBM didn't create an innovative product though. If you look at the era, there were dozens of machines of a similar style on the market, either z80 or 8080, 8088, even 8086... but they ran CP/M. PC-DOS was effectively a kind of fork / rip-off of DR's CP/M, but clean room and customized for 8086. IBM created a rather generic machine using off the shelf components, and someone else's operating system. Innovation factor was almost zero. The only advantage it had was it had IBM's name on it, and IBM was still a Really Big Deal then. It brought "respectability" to a thing that before was still a weird subculture.
- NetMageSCW 1y ago
  I don’t know, I think the concept of a BIOS with a documented API and the included minimal component set (e.g. serial port, parallel port) raised the bar on what third party software could assume existed and could be accessed over the existing 8-bit computers if the time.
  - 1y ago

chuckadams 1y ago

> First, IBM didn’t make the most of its dominance. It did little to make the IBM version of the PC truly unique. They tried, in the form of the previously mentioned PS/2. They just squeezed a little too hard. There was also the PCjr, which was riddled with enough technical flaws at a blistering price point for it to also end up a flop (Charlie Chaplin was also not exactly a great choice to sell to a market already trending younger). IBM might have eventually gotten it right, they just lost the will to keep trying. Their business model depended on landing corporate whales buying high-margin products and services; mere commodities were a plebeian concern beneath them.

blargthorwars 1y ago
I'm glad we have a word now for Charlie Chaplin misfire: Cringe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LR1Xvvch18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LR1Xvvch18
- glhaynes 1y ago
  I'm not sure it was a misfire — I remember those ads as being pretty popular and having big mindshare. But that was certainly just my small perspective of the times.
  - chuckadams 1y ago
    I remember eyebrows being raised even at the time over the Chaplin ads, but I suppose they're memorable enough even today that they couldn't have been all that off the mark. Certainly wasn't the worst of the missteps around the PCjr (and I'd forgotten they ran the same flavor of ads for the PC AT, which was a fine machine!)
    - theologic 1y ago
      Externally, it was universally praised. I was selling PC gray market at the time, and it was highly effective. The only people that I knew that had a problem with it was certain IBMers that felt it didn't rep the Blue Channel (corporate sales) and our corporate PCs. However, as the IBM sales took off, I met anybody inside of IBM when I eventually got there that said, "Well that stupid campaign we had...."

Lu2025 1y ago

> I don’t think that culturally IBM ever really felt that the PC was a true IBM product This makes perfect sense. In the early 2010s I worked with what remained of IBM development and was surprised at the dysfunction, complete lack of manufacturing culture and engineering approaches. I couldn't believe that this culture could produce a successful product. Guess what, it actually didn't.

leoc 1y ago
IBM wasn’t that hopeless, at least not so early. It produced some fairly successful and well-regarded products in the ‘80s and ‘90s like the POWER architecture, the AS/400, and updates to its mainframe line.
thedougd 1y ago
2010's would have been too late to see those things. Wrt PCs, the PC company sale was complete and IIRC Lenovo was no longer even sharing space with IBM.
wpm 1y ago
I’m sure the IBM of the 2010s bore little resemblance to the engineering culture that gave them the reputation that made the 5150 as important as it was.
theologic 1y ago
The PC group was sold to Lenovo in 2005. What group did you work with and where?

divbzero 1y ago

I find it sad that IBM didn’t view ThinkPad as a core business and chose to sell it instead. They made some of the best laptops at the time.

cmrdporcupine 1y ago
Margins on consumer PC hardware are quite low, and were really low through the late 90s. There was no point being in that market for them, and they made a pivot to switch to only two markets: services (IBM Global Services is huge still) and mainframe customers (which I gather they must still make a lot of money on, and the hardware is actually quite interesting and well-engineered, just stupid expensive). I'm surprised Db2 still exists as a product they actively develop, to be honest. Maybe because their services branch and mainframe customers still use it heavily.

manithree 1y ago

Having lived through all this, I highly recommend "The Crazy Ones" blog from Gareth Edwards. https://every.to/the-crazy-ones https://every.to/the-crazy-ones The blog on Don Estridge covers IBM's place in PC history in fascinating and extensive detail. Mr. Edwards also reminded me what a debt Linux users owe to Rod Canion for making the gang of 9 and open hardware a reality.

Theodores 1y ago

Can anyone remember when IBM made their own clones? Ambra? They had very unusual mice but I never saw one in the wild. The sale to Lenovo went very well, when compared to how most mergers, acquisitions and consolidations went in the period. I can't remember Lenovo from before the acquisition and, again, I can't remember seeing any pre-Thinkpad Lenovo machines.

theologic 1y ago
I was there. Ambra was an attempt to: 1. Get out from the blue tax 2. Have and alternative procurement path 3. Set up a channel where we might not cannibalize ourselves. 4. Free outselves from some of our rigorous engineering processes It was basically a fail fast experiment, which is popular today. It was set up with the thought process that we wanted it more virtual and not to disrupt the core business. It became obvious pretty quick that it brought its own set of risks, and so we moved into Aptiva. It is good to try and fail and get out. Actually, the Lenovo acquisition was a bit of a war. There was some visionary leadership from the most senior level of Lenovo that saw the core USA as extremely valuable, and allowed them to win arguments. While their long term goal was to move the core to China, they were careful to make sure they kept a lot of the USA team engaged, and many key USA individuals did move or travel constantly to China. However, I wasn't a part of the company when it was sold, so most of this is top level feedback from my friends that did go.
- Theodores 1y ago
  Thanks for chiming in. I vaguely remember the press trolling IBM for Aptiva too. Where were the Ambra machines sourced? Were they special clones like Compaq (where the BIOS was different), decent commodity clones like Dell or were they generic clones like everything off-brand? I never understood what the value proposition was. Was it a bit like a supermarket own brand where the customer kind-of guesses that the brand leader makes them, much like how Americans know CostCo Kirkland diapers are made by Huggies?
  - theologic 1y ago
    The value prop is that we could launch a Dell (Gateway) channel by offering leading edge systems, and look for unique features, and live in the other guys holes. The team wasn't stupid, and they had a matrix of where they felt that they could put some products into the ecosystem that could occupy some space that Dell (Gateway) didn't have clear products. If I remember correctly, there was also some thought that we could cut off Dell in EMEA. (Europe.) Dell was far stronger in the USA at the time. Being this is 30 years ago, I can't remember an exact matrix on some that wasn't my core product. But they had a strategy. This was early in my career, but I happened to be in a pivotable position that got me access above my pay grade. (I have this weird background in both marketing and engineering, and as somebody that can speak both, I turned into basically a language translator in many meetings, then I was sent out as PR person to the magazines.) I did not work for the Ambra team, but they had an impact on my work, so I got to be involved a enough to see the edges. I'm not going to have the exact numbers, but I remember that we stated that we were going to have no more than 8 IBMers involved with the thing. The Taiwanese clone market was just starting to take off, and we were starting to outsource to Taiwan. If I remember correctly, it was the Phoenix BIOS, who we had already done a deal with for our Consumer PC line. (Actually, it was co-development.) As I already wrote, the final bit is that the guys had done some anonymous bid work, and had gotten some very aggressive bids--better than what we were getting. So, they had the impression that they could take a lot of cost out of the system. Also, we wanted to take out Dell and Gateway, but not impact the core IBM brand. Compaq was considered the real comp. HP second. Dell was this annoying "can't stop them because they always win the bids" company. Gateway was on the fringe, and more of a threat to our consumer brand, which was small at the time. But it was free TAM. So, there was an impression if we followed the Dell/Gateway model, leading tech, very competitive pricing, and full page ads, with some systems that lived in the space, we could start to cannibalize the their TAM. Now, you don't want to read back into history. The Dell then is not the Dell of now. But, buying behavior was stronger with Dell than the group anticipated. It just was tough to get the velocity growth they wanted. I think we launched in EMEA first, maybe because that is where the VP that ran the thing was from, and then it was rolled out in the USA. However, it just did not see the growth, and I remember there were some quality issues that the small group couldn't handle, but this is pretty foggy. I will also state that the Round Rock team (and even Gateway), was incredibly tough competition in this arena. I would say that the team did not appreciate this. However, it was never a massive corporate push for RTP--the home of the PC and PC Server. It was a "let's try this and see if we can learn something." I do remember most of us in the core PC team to NOT get involved as it wasn't pitched as being our core business. If I remember correctly, we did help share some information on parts that we procured to help them. Its not Costco as the models are so different. As I have run a distribution business before, and Costco is really a marvel to me. My disti business was to the VAR channel, but my sister group used Costco and Walmart. Costco is absolute maniac about delivering value to their customers with quality. Really, it blows me away. They had a bunch of brands, and Sinegal said they could combine them all under Kirkland, turn it into a quality brand to drag up the entire Costco brand. He is so freaking brilliant, and I would argue unique to a company that had a distribution business that wanted to position themselves in the consumer's mind. I would argue that Costco never used their branding to indicate a "secret way" to get a better brand. I think that Costco is keen on making sure that Kirkland IS the brand, which is different than Ambra. Thanks for asking. I don't think we ever did this type of post mortem at the time, and thinking through events always seems to generate learning for myself as I type it down.

amelius 1y ago

The real "Personal Computer" is of course the smartphone.

arminiusreturns 1y ago
No, because it became a locked down ecosystem that is user-hostile and not user-controllable. I realized this when I observed the younger generation, who I thought would be much better than us at computing, who had not a clue how anything worked because they never had the ability, need, or desire to tinker with the underlying systems, with only rare exceptions (roms, etc).
- amelius 1y ago
  You are right, in a way. But losing your smartphone is like losing all your personal information. In that sense it is a personal computer.
  - hulitu 1y ago
    > In that sense it is a personal computer. No it is a "personal", but not "computer".
    - amelius 1y ago
      Not a general purpose computer, but still a computer.
  - AngryData 1y ago
    Depends on your lifestyle and location. The only thing I use my cellphone for is text messaging and looking at wikipedia or part numbers when im not at home. It is definitely useful, but 95% of my computer work is still done on a PC.
spankibalt 1y ago
A smartphone (-like device) has indeed the potential to be an ultramobile general-purpose personal computer. Sadly, virtually all of them don't reach that potential.

theologic 1y ago

It's always interesting to see these types of articles with a bunch of people pontificating about what was or wasn't happening at IBM. I started my career at IBM and had the chance to engage with the Boca Raton group and the PC division there, working as an internal supplier within IBM. The idea that the PC Group was somehow destroyed by "antibodies" is ridiculous on its face—this notion is often spoken by people who have no real background with the group or a true understanding of what was going on. As Patrick Lencioni has often said, we have things reported as strategy, when it turns out to be people issues. A lot of what happened at IBM only makes sense if you were there. I'll list some things here, though since I'm late to the conversation, I’m not sure how much it will be observed. However, perhaps an IBMer who was with the PC Company will come across this and add a few more alternatives or supporting facts. 1. IBM was a wildly diverse place culturally. We had almost half a million employees worldwide. As with any large corporation, you could find divergent views—anyone could find a person or two to support anything they wanted to claim about the company. However, the PC division was generally well regarded. Sure, you can find somebody who said something about "antibodies", but you can find a lot more who would say that’s ridiculous. I tend more toward the latter than the former. 2. Don Estridge was a bit of a cowboy. He did love being down in Florida, which gave him the ability to move quickly. Still, I would say IBM allowed for its “wild ducks”, and while the PC group was one of the more obvious successes, it was not IBM’s only success. Estridge died in a well-publicized airplane accident at Dallas Fort Worth. I don't think most people understand how much cultural impact this had on the group. Although it could be debated, I do believe we could say it was as if Bill Gates or Steve Jobs had been taken out of their company. The amazing thing about the PC group is that it didn’t collapse after his death. 3. The single most destructive thing IBM did was thinking they could take the PC group out of Boca and transport it to Research Triangle Park. After it moved to RTP, I got to work there with many of the group’s core members. They consistently described how the move was traumatic to virtually every aspect of a team that was truly world-class. (Another issue: There was also a development decision in Boca that some decried—some forward-thinking was shelved—but I wasn’t heavily involved in that, and it wasn’t so universal.) 4. I was in the midst of the turmoil as IBM reached the midlife of the PC in RTP. By that stage, we had given up on the idea of clear, proprietary closed systems. Yet at the same time, we were doing some excellent engineering and marketing—we were finally winning awards from PC magazines for the desktops, and people already loved our laptops. But we were clearly hamstrung. Without going deep into details, it’s clear in today’s economy that certain business units serve different purposes. The PC Division was expected to make a lot of money while paying what was internally called “the blue tax.” In other words, corporate hit us with effective tax rates and metrics that basically made it impossible to compete with Compaq or Dell. What most people don’t realize is that one of the biggest impacts of selling the group to Lenovo was the removal of the blue tax. Many key U.S. development team members stayed with the company, and though Lenovo was committed to eventually moving true development headquarters to China, it would have collapsed without an incredibly dedicated group of IBMers who were unfailingly unselfish. There was something about the culture—dedication to the team was one of the most important things you could do, even after the group had been sold to Lenovo. On reflection, if Estridge never died, and if the division had never moved from Boca, the computing industry would be very different as being apart of what happened.

musicale 1y ago

> Because IBM’s BIOS was soon reverse engineered Someone might also have read the BIOS source code listing that IBM provided: https://archive.org/details/IBMPCIBM5150TechnicalReference6322507APR84/page/5-29/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/IBMPCIBM5150TechnicalReference63...

pjmlp 1y ago
Anyone doing that was tainted due to copyright law.
- musicale 1y ago
  As you indicate, in clean-room design the implementation is done by a different team from those who examined the original system and wrote the spec (which is vetted): > Typically, a clean-room design is done by having someone examine the system to be reimplemented and having this person write a specification. This specification is then reviewed by a lawyer to ensure that no copyrighted material is included. The specification is then implemented by a team with no connection to the original examiners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design The article above makes some interesting points about whether clean-room design is actually necessary.

jecel 1y ago

"IBM had no moat around the PC." is true about the original PC and XT, but they did have 7 patents on the AT. After the PS/2 attempt didn't work out, their lawyers spent the first half of the 1990s going after the chipset makers and the second half of the 1990s getting clone makers themselves to license these patents (along with some other unrelated ones that weren't about to expire). A quick search showed it isn't easy to find online version of these patents (because IBM has so many that even knowing these are from 1984 didn't help), but I remember that one was related to being able to split a screen into a graphics and a text part in their EGA board (though the Apple II previously did this too, but with a fixed split), one was about detecting 360KB vs 1.2MB floppy drives by seeking to track 60 and then stepping back 59 tracks and checking if we were now at track 0 (not unlike how the Apple II handled the lack of a track 0 signal, but for a different purpose), one was for the "bus master" signal in the PC AT (later ISA) bus and I can't seem to remember the other four but they were all similar in style. So in the late 1990s you had to pay IBM if you wanted to make a PC clone (AT and up, but 8088 clones had died out in the early 1990s).