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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree.

Fun historical note, IBM generated cash in its early days as Google and Apple do today, it bought a lot of real estate all around the world. In the 90's when it seemed liked it was doomed, it "saved itself" by selling off big chunks of that real estate. That gave the company operating capital without having to go to the equity markets or debt markets.

Given the ups and downs of tech, it seems like a much better place to hold your spare cash than t-bills or other cash equivalent securities.

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> it "saved itself" by selling off big chunks of that real estate

Sounds like the losing end of a game of Monopoly!

You don't have to "save yourself" if your winning...

The interesting thing is that there are at least 10 buildings/floors leased by IBM just in Manhattan. The prominent ones are the "IBM Building" in midtown (that used to be owned by IBM) and still has its name on the building and the somewhat iconic 51 Astor Place which is the Watson HQ.

>In the 90's when it seemed liked it was doomed, it "saved itself" by selling off big chunks of that real estate.

Wonder if that was during Lou Gerstner's time as CEO at IBM. I had read his book Who says Elephants can't Dance, about what he did to turn IBM around. It was an interesting read.

Don't remember if selling off some of their real estate was part of what they did, though it could have been.

A review of the book by an IBM insider:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/2071.htm...

Also just saw that the book is available on the Internet Archive in multiple formats like text, PDF and EPUB:

https://archive.org/details/WhoSaysElephantsCantDance

The real estate fire sale started in 1992 along with the spin–outs of various divisions (some of which completed, like IBM Federal Systems and Lexmark, others were halted by Gerstner like AdStar (storage systems) and Pennant (big printers).

Interesting. I'm reading that book (again) from the Archive, should be worth it.

I read some of it.

This is a good part: The Click Heard Round the World.

It's in Chapter 4: Out to the Field (of the PDF of the book).

Something to remember with that book is that it's a highly selective perspective. Gerstner did do a lot to turn IBM around, possibly the best thing he did was to cut through tradition and corporate poltics with a chainsaw to make decisions. IBM in the early 90s was catastrophically stuck in between knowing the world was shifting and an inability to address the changing world.

Decisions you don't hear much about are things like selling off the IBM Global Network at the height of the dot com era, probbaly short term brilliance, but the sale included much of IBM's commercial web hosting, which left IBM blind to the shift to cloud a decade ago.

Or the decision to effectively axe OS/2 almost immediately after the Warp release, not so much because Windows 95 was better, but because the continued existence of OS/2 was inconvenient to the PC division.

Not saying it's a bad book, but like much history it tells a story from the perspective of the victor.

I get your points.

Incidentally, I had read good reviews of OS/2 Warp in a computer magazine, PC Quest. I think they included a trial or full copy of Warp with that issue on a CD. (They used to do that now and then, and I got to try out QNX for a while that way - very fast and light OS.) It was a while back, but I remember a few things, like they said it (Warp) was very stable, maybe fast, and probably a few more good points.

I remember terms like System Object Model and Workplace Shell, although I probably did not understand all of those concepts fully - a bit too junior at the time, maybe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_Object_Model

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workplace_Shell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

I’m obviously biased but I thought it was a decent O/S. App support was minimal but with the WinOS2 support you could run most Windows code. I thought the TCP/IP stack was years ahead of Windows, not quite comparable to what you'd find on SunOS/Solaris or whatever DEC ran on the microvax workstations.

IBM, being IBM, charged an arm and both legs for the development kit, even to internal employees.

I managed to use it until June 1998 when I found it was getting to be too much of a pain to dual boot to Windows to open Netscape (there was a Netscape browser for OS/2 but it was web years behind what they were distributing on Windows and *nix).

Interesting.

>I thought the TCP/IP stack was years ahead of Windows, not quite comparable to what you'd find on SunOS/Solaris or whatever DEC ran on the microvax workstations.

I remember back in the day, people saying that the TCP/IP and Internet layers on Windows were not good. There was this software called Trumpet Winsock, which may have tried to make things better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsock#Other_implementations

You may be interested in "Mike's PC Jr. page" which is linked to in this blog post:

Lissajous hippo, retrocomputing and the IBM PC Jr.:

https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/09/lissajous-hippo.html

He wrote a TCP/IP stack for his IBM PC Jr. and is using it :)

"Land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts".

Definitely more so then bitcoins.

Not if you're one of the Pacific islands, which are being slowly swamped by the rising ocean.

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