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.
Yea but we're stuck with the same horrible keybindings that stopped making sense before the 90s hit
> Macbooks are locked down with Apple and forget about your own hardware.
Not completely. Asahi linux boots on bare metal and runs great on Apple silicon machines prior to the M3.
Mostly because Apple is so rich that they don't care. If they were not swimming in a pool of money this wouldn't happen.
> If they were not swimming in a pool of money this wouldn't happen.
Interestingly enough, Apple helped to develop a version of Linux running on the Mach microkernel, and handed out thousands of MkLinux CDs at WWDC and MacWorld Boston in 1996. Macs have been running Linux in various ways ever since.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux
http://gate.crashing.org/doc/ppc/doc003.htm
Windows has also been running on intel Macs since Boot Camp in 2007. It remains to be seen whether ARM Windows will ever run natively on Apple Silicon however.
In those days Apple was doing whatever they could to avoid bankruptcy.
What do you suppose they would do? Seems to me that once the hardware is out there someone determined enough can find a way, no? I don’t see how this would affect their bottom line negatively either… hell, if they officially supported Linux I’m sure their hardware sales would do even better!
They have unofficially added boot? code that helps Asahi Linux. They not only don’t care, they’ve actively abetted.
Parent tweet is dead, you know what happened ?
ironically, you should be thanking Apple that the IBM PC exists
The Apple II was an open system and IBM clearly took a lot of inspiration from the Apple II line. Look at the 5150 motherboard in the picture in the article and compare it to the motherboard from an Apple II+
Apple II was an open system in a sense. Apple published the schematics and ROM source code. But it didn't have well defined interfaces that developers respected. A lot of published software, including some of the most popular apps, made use of variables and entry points in "unofficial" ways. This made it impossible for Apple or anybody else to even know how it was being used, much less to write a compatible ROM or OS that was not an exact copy of the original.
And if an updated system were to break any published app, Apple would be blamed. There were apps, albeit only a few, that would not run on an Apple IIe, and I think, a few more that wouldn't run on a IIc.
There were some notable violations of published entry points in MS-DOS software, most notably the page locations of display memory, leading to the famous "640k barrier." But they weren't enough to dissuade developers from treating the PC as an "open enough" platform.
I doubt that developers felt a particular sense of morality about the DOS interface, that they didn't feel about Apple II, but only that the interface was good enough to use as-is.
The real important thing here, was the openly published interface, and mutual agreement among devs to respect that interface. I mean "open enough" and "mostly respect" of course.
I believe they were both "accidentally open" for similar reasons. Neither company produced the most important chips and components in the device itself. That meant that you could assemble a greater understanding of the device than even the manufacturer had and there was good incentive for putting this effort in the early days of computing.
Intentionally open. As noted above, Apple published schematics and ROM source code. IBM published system board schematics as well as the BIOS source code.
And when people made Apple II clones, most of them (like the Franklin Ace series) got sued out of existence by Apple. Eventually true clean-room ROMs were created like for the Laser 128, but that was fairly late in the life-span of the Apple II.
You are right. We are lucky. A company like Digital could have made the PDP-11 into 'the PC' and lock it down from the beginning. IBM could have done the same if they had not been so incompetent. In such a case you would have Intel, IBM and Microsoft being a single organization that would have become to powerful.
We still had plenty of issue with Intel and Microsoft being able to play out their monopoly.
So I think it could have been a lot worse, but it could also have been a lot better.
> A company like Digital could have made the PDP-11 into 'the PC'
They did! I kind of want one of these PDP-11 based PCs:
Just wait for the PC ARM to take off as the anti-x86 keeps cheerleading, how open do you think it will remain?
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
Microsoft has been a decent enough steward of the x86 PC standard and the qualification test suite that defines it. If they are smart (which isn't necessarily guaranteed) and with enough pressure from industry and anti-competitiveness regulators to not close it off, they would probably be an adequate steward of a ARM PC standard as well.
Microsoft deliberately requested that "secure" boot NOT be allowed to be disabled on ARM devices in their requirements.
Don't believe me?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_boot#Secure_Boot_critic...
"x86-based systems certified for Windows 8 must allow Secure Boot to enter custom mode or be disabled, but not on systems using the ARM architecture"
You forgot to add the security CPU requirements using Pluton, based on XBox security, which I bet many HNers are unaware of.
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.
You’d have the start of a niche hobbyist market that no one would care about. Software is needed before a market exists.
> 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.
I'd argue lack of something like ACPI to discover the device tree and memory map is why this impression exists. Besides the ARM CPUs not being socketed.
Exactly. There is no agreement on how the universal operating system should expect the generic ARM computer to boot and expose its hardware.
> There's nothing inherently not-open about ARM,
UEFI ?
UEFI doesn't help with hardware discovery. ACPI does. Commonly with non-PC systems the hardware addresses are hard-coded and they need to be known by the OS somehow. Device trees are that and there are nonofficial ways of exposing them as a UEFI driver but it is nowhere as official as ACPI on PC systems.
> Just wait for the PC ARM to take off
I'm waiting. A PC (ATX) with ARM or RISC-V or Mx or Power would be very nice.
Haven't seen any though. Raspberry is a joke from a PC extendability point of view.
Because OEM rather sell laptops with vertical integration, which are going to become the PC of the future, as the build your own desktop market keeps shrinking.
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.
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.
Other than using COTS parts (incl. the CPU), the BIOS, while proprietary, was in a way the weakest link as far as cloning, since it established a ROM-based standardized hardware interface that isolated the OS from the hardware.
Companies like Compaq, and later Phoenix and AMI, were able to get around the proprietary nature of the BIOS by building clean-room BIOS clones that withstood IBM's legal challenges.
However, given the willingness of Microsoft (apparently with little IBM could do about it) to sell MS-DOS variants to others like Compaq, and later the emergence of MS-DOS clones like DR-DOS, it's not obvious that clones might not still have taken off without the unintentional assist of the standardized BIOS interface.
I wouldn't say the BIOS was the weakest link. It was really the only obstacle, albeit a weak one. Surely, the BIOS was clean-room reverse engineered very soon and after that, the PC-clone market just exploded.
However, if there were no BIOS, the thin hardware abstraction layer that the BIOS provided would be part of MS-DOS. I see only two historical alternatives from that:
1. Microsoft would have had an even greater upper hand in controlling the PC market.
2. IBM could have kept the BIOS proprietary (even though as a part of MS DOS), which prevented Microsoft from selling MS-DOS independently with an IBM PC abstraction layer.
However, even if option 2 prevailed, Microsoft could have created its own BIOS to ensure that software written for MS-DOS would be compatible across the PC clone market.
> standardized hardware interface that isolated the OS from the hardware
Exactly the point of having a BIOS. CP/M had one as well.
There’s a lot, lot more to a PC being standard than the BIOS API. Attempts like the Tandy 2000 showed that hardware that deviated too much couldn’t run the same software and failed.
Amazing that Tandy managed to turn success into failure twice in the PC market.
> mistakes that made clones possible
You mean like publishing the system board schematics and a full source listing for the BIOS?
That seems to have been surprisingly normal for PCs in the late 1970s.
Apple also published schematics and listings, and had to deal with clones, but Apple 2 clones weren't particularly useful without a copy of (or compatible replacement for) Apple's ROM, which Apple did not license.
Protected under copyright law, and not allowed for cloning just because.
I am 70's child, kind of aware how common it used to be during those days.
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.
That is certainly part of it.
> 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.
I do not think that is true. Lets remember that still in 1990 IBM alone was about 50% of the whole market. Even without clones IBM PC would have won.
Had IBM made clones impossible they could likely have captured far more of the market.
It certainly wasn't IBM ability to produce PC that prevented them selling more.
Likely eventually they would have licensed the architecture to AT&T and the like.
Vertical integration could have worked, we are just lucky it didn't.
In what bubble?
In 1990, everyone on my higschool that had access to computers was distributed between Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga, and PCs, with PCs being the minority.
Personally I only moved into PCs in 1991, with a 386SX.
Until then, I only used the PC1512 ones on the school lab.
I became part of the PC minority.
The one outside your bubble. In the business world where sales occurred, IBM had a huge advantage.
In which country, again?
Because in Iberian Penisula, it was full of green phosphor terminals into timesharing systems, and random 16 bit computers from all brands on the more creative side.
In 1990 it wasn't certain that PC would really take over, everyone was mostly on MS-DOS, and not everyone was still buying into Windows, which only got 3.0 released in the middle of the year and demanded too expensive hardware for most business.
Ditto in Spain. Until 1996 or so I didn't see WIndows 95 installs. From 1997 they were everywhere.
> 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.
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.
Having lived through all this, I highly recommend "The Crazy Ones" blog from Gareth Edwards. 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.
> 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.
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.
The PC group was sold to Lenovo in 2005. What group did you work with and where?
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.
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.
> 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/IBMPCIBM5150TechnicalReference63...
Anyone doing that was tainted due to copyright law.
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.
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.
It actually is a case study from the Innovator's Dilemma:
Yet IBM’s success in the first five years of the personal computing industry stands in stark contrast to
the failure of the other leading mainframe and minicomputer makers to catch the disruptive desktop
computing wave. How did IBM do it? It created an autonomous organization in Florida, far away from its
New York state headquarters, that was free to procure components from any source, to sell through its own
channels, and to forge a cost structure appropriate to the technological and competitive requirements
of the personal computing market. The organization was free to succeed along metrics of success that were
relevant to the personal computing market. In fact, some have argued that IBM’s subsequent decision to
link its personal computer division much more closely to its mainstream organization was an important
factor in IBM’s difficulties in maintaining its profitability and market share in the personal computer
industry. It seems to be very difficult to manage the peaceful, unambiguous coexistence of two cost
structures, and two models for how to make money, within a single company.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.
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.
The IBM PC did not include a serial or parallel port. Just a keyboard port and a cassette port (the latter of which approximately nobody used)
CP/M had a BIOS with a documented API.
> 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.
In a rare feat, Apple managed to do just that with the iPhone, which ate the iPod’s lunch. This at a time when the iPod was a core product, directly responsible for their revival and success, that could have been milked for years to come.
One of Apple’s founding philosophies from Steve Jobs made this explicit:
“One of Job's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. " If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will," he said. So even though an Iphone might cannibalize sales of an IPod, or an IPad might cannibalize sales of a laptop, that did not deter him.” — Walter Isaacson
and now we have ipad that perfectly capable of running MacOs but Apple refuse to do so.
iPads already outsell Macs. I imagine Apple is willing to accept lower margin overall for iPad hardware (vs. Mac) since it gets a cut of iPad software sales on the App Store. This is perhaps a business reason for why you want macOS on an iPad and Apple does not.
However, Jobs also believed in product differentiation and thought that having too many products in the same space was confusing. Arguably by making iPadOS more macOS-like Apple is reducing that differentiation and increasing confusion.
They also kind of did it with the Mac. For 4 years after the Mac was introduced, it was still the Apple II that was paying the bills, the Mac was flopping. It took stubborn management to keep investing in the Mac and not give up on it and try to evolve the Apple II instead (imagining a future based on the IIgs here)
Ehh, im not sure they could have milked it for very long, if the iphone didn't come out somebody else would have made the same kind of device within a year or two and made ipods obsolete shortly after. PDAs were already a thing with many models and competitors, cell phone transceivers were getting far smaller and efficient, and solid state storage was getting reasonably cheap.
The most impressive thing about the iphone I didn't think has anything to do with the technology, and everything to do with timing the release of a mobile device to hit the sweet spot between the cost of the hardware and capability of the hardware.
Where I lived in Europe, by the time the iPhone came out, a lot of people (me included) were already using Sony Ericsson Walkman phones instead for music listening
I think you greatly underestimate the iPhone’s original impact and the reason that other very successful companies went out of business entirely due to it. It broke new ground in more than just technology e.g. also in the relationship between the phone manufacturer and the carrier, and advantage it kept for some time and in the software developed for it e.g. a full browser versus WAP.
> 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.
Steve Jobs came to my university in 1984 to push the Mac, where he told us that we students could buy one for half price. At the same talk he rattled off all the flaws of the PCjr and said the famous line "IBM should do us a favor and just throw them all in the Hudson."
VT did deals early(ish) in the home computer era to provide incoming CS students with discounted computers and the first deal was with Apple for Lisas with hard drives, and the next years deal was with IBM for PCjrs. Fortunately I arrived just before that.
A discounted Lisa still cost in the neighborhood of a new car at the time, and given the failure rates of its weird "Twiggy" drive, probably in the shop about as often.
I bought a Lisa in those days for $5000 which was half price, including a 5MB (!) hard disk. It used the same floppies the Mac did. Apple had already removed the twiggies by that time.
I'm glad we have a word now for Charlie Chaplin misfire: Cringe
I completely understand that if you were there in the culture how this can hopeless outdated. So, I completely understand how this would be a massive flop today. However, at the time, it was extremely well regarded as effective and universally praised. It was just "grind it out" marketing, and maybe you would need to understand Ries and Trout to get it. But is was good by any measurement that was being run. However, it feels like a polyester jumpsuit.
I would argue things like the 1984 ad from Apple were bizarre, and while it makes the mark, it wasn't pivotable in terms of actually being effective. It appealed to Apples core, but wasn't effective in terms of ad dollars.
What was mind blowing is when Jobs came back to Apple, and Chiat/Day launched "Think Different." This was not grind it out. It was not "weird Apple" stuff.
It was awe-inspiring branding that changed the nature of technology marketing. It was beautify and emotive. I think it holds up well today, and may well hold together for many generations to come.
The subsequent "Get a Mac / PC vs Mac" ads were beyond brilliant in being able to pivot away from just emotion to an informed sense of humor.
I like the iPod ads, but we started to lose the edge.
I see none of the raw brilliance today that was a part of the previous years. However, I think they still do a great job of grind it out marketing, and they have continued to understand their brand. Maybe this is okay for where they are at.
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.
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!)
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...."
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.
"I've Been Moved."
(-:
So somebody either has worked for IBM or had a family member worked there, as this is one of the standard jokes.
I was moved every two years, and it was a full M&L.
I will treasure my time there as remarkable rich.
> IBM brought the quality of it’s support and it’s endorsement as a personal computer that was worthy of ‘serious’ businesses.
*its
*itsIt'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."
> 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.
The real "Personal Computer" is of course the smartphone.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> In that sense it is a personal computer.
No it is a "personal", but not "computer".
Not a general purpose computer, but still a computer.
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.
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.
>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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.