The IBM PC, 41 Years Ago
os2museum.com
os2museum.com
Afaik it was an internal skunkworks project led by a rather visionary for IBM leader that knew it would be dead if it did things the IBM way.
IBM made the market legitimate and the bus spec was open and anybody could make expansion cards without paying royalties.
They were very surprised when it became a hit and established a new market but then they lost it when the closed spec MCA (Microchannel Architecture) PC.
The cloners (Dell/Compaq) banded together and did EISA (Extended ISA) in reponse and went their own way.
I think that BIOS listing sealed IBM's fate to lose control of the platform; it made it near trivial for a competitor to analyze and shove under the doorway of a "clean room" team to reimplement.
Contrast this with my Commodore 128 or TRS-80 Model 100, which ship with schematics, opcode info, etc. and had a healthy book ecosystem around them.
I hit my limits with the relatively weak TI-BASIC, but having nowhere else to go (even with the technical "green manual"), I wonder what I would have gotten up to had there been more there like a built-in assembler. Then again, the thing did ship in 1979 initially and was the first home 16-bit machine (technically).
I noticed.
Apple and PC computers cost more. At one point then, being open seemed worth more to me.
No schematics, though.
Really, I was speaking to what came with the machines.
Buy an Apple, and get schematics, ROM listing, etc, and there it all is in the open. And it was ready to use.
An Atari was a different experience. Was not ready to program, and technical details took a while to be published.
My first "PC" was an Apple 2. My first machine was an Atari. My first IBM type PC was much closer to the Apple than it was Atari.
Sounds like an interesting story. Is there a book or website like folklore.org?
There's a copy on The Internet Archive you can "borrow" for free:
The blog itself is great, providing detailed accounts about iconic products and business initiatives in the tech industry.
Even other computers used the same color.
I remember buying a Atari 1020st (I might have gotten the number wrong). I bought it for word processing, since writing was my weak subject. I remember getting the computer home, and was hooked. I went through college without telling anyone about my computer. I felt like I was cheating.
The only thing I never liked was that horrid beige color.
Years later, while in a bad mood, I tossed my computer, and printer. There hasen't been a week that went by where I regret throwing it away. I tossed it because it was becomming obsolete, but mainly because of the color.
Does anyone know for sure why so many manufacturers when with that beige?
The Amiga was beige like most of the PCs of that era. As for the reason, I think it was just fashion. Beige + smoked glass doors was fashionable in the early 80s in offices.
The pre-PC retail market was by necessity constrained. Main-street retailers had to stock so many distinct platforms that they couldn't go deep on any one of them. If you wanted anything beyond the first-party disc drive or the top 10 software packages, you're stuck looking for specialist dealers or mail order, which was a significant barrier to entry for new users.
A single dominant PC platform made the late-80s-90s-early-2000s model of "white box" computer retail feasible. They could offer a greater assortment of IBM-compatible software and peripherals, while taking less risk that you'd be stranded with dead inventory.
This, in turn, supported a galaxy of small software firms and hardware manufacturers.
Apple is a trillion dollar company for a reason, their tech is Post-PC, people want easy to use iPad Pros than a Surface Pro. People want iPhones and the MacOS has evolved to the point that it can be ported to ARM chips.
So I am kind of biased to those non-IBM PC form factors anyway.
In any case, there are coding environments available for not-serious development on the go, and then there are laptops.
Standardisation had already happened in the S100 space. What IBM introduced was mass marketing to businesses. The technology was incidental.
Apple already had a consumer dealer network, Amiga/Atari/Acorn had already made inroads, and there would have been a shake-out and consolidation.
Without the PC it's likely some other manufacturer - possibly even Compaq - would have jumped on S100 instead and commoditised it. Probably with 68k and maybe Concurrent CP/M and/or BSD. It only needed one company to make the marketing leap. So standardisation was likely inevitable.
Sales growth might have been slower, with more churn for consumer/gaming machines. But the technology would have started from a higher base.
And it wouldn't have been held back by the miserably poor design of Intel hardware and MS software, both of which regressed existing levels of tech by at least a decade.
The worst thing about the PC was that it established such low user expectations: slow, ugly, crippled machines that sort-of worked in a very limited way with poor security, stability, and reliability, and "standard" software products that were even worse.
Businesses wanted anything, literally any working product.
The competition mostly stood there in their ivory towers (NeXT was the best representative of this), shrugged their noses at the folks that needed cheap computers for, you know, the computing revolution and over time, keeled over.
> slow, ugly, crippled machines that sort-of worked in a very limited way with poor security, stability, and reliability, and "standard" software products that were even worse
Yet they worked and they were cheap.
Slow didn't matter because they worked.
Ugly didn't matter because they worked.
"Crippled machines that sort-of worked in a very limited way with poor security, , stability, and reliability, and 'standard' software products that were even worse" didn't matter because they worked and nobody truly cares about security as the main ongoing concern. Stability was good enough. Reliability was good enough. The standards were good enough.
And the main thing, I repeat this: PCs were CHEAP. Anything I can't afford might as well not exist on the planet. It's not there. I can't do anything with it.
Companies could afford PCs and they did what was needed. Not what some people thought would be needed, they did what was actually needed.
When the PC first came out it really wasn't that cheap. It took grey market PCs before consumers saw any decent discounts for brand name IBM PCs. Once clones landed then it was a race to the bottom. Even so having worked in retail computer sales myself at the time you are correct that cheap and functional often won the day over brand name.
This was before Microsoft had cemented their lead on productivity apps so we sold plenty of Altos Xenix machines to small businesses and tons of Kaypros to budget-conscious college students. People were perfectly happy with Informix, Multicalc, Wordstar and Lotus 1-2-3.
IBM used off the shelf parts for the IBM PC, so others were able to copy it easily. When IBM made the PS/2 series with Microchannel it was supposed to be a clone killer.
Ironic that IBM does not make PCs anymore, and sold that IP to Lenovo.
It showed that software rendering on increasing faster Intel CPU's could outmatch the Amiga chipset which stagnated because
a) The original chip/OS architects left Commodore b) It was too closely tied to the Motorola 68000 timing/bus architecture which did not match Intel.
Once you had those and a serial terminal program for your legacy system there was no way the 8 bit inspired computers like amiga would ever compete again. Macs were a distant but respectable competitor but only in niche markets. Then networking shut the door completely. If you system couldn't do ethernet you were boned.
The workstation vendors had a brief period where they had a shot but the PC market caught up too fast.
Doom was fun but by 1993 when it was released the PC had already dominated the market for over a decade.
I did ARCnet for quite a long time before 10base2 and eventually 10 Base-T took off.
If you were really poor, you could use "The $25 network" from Information Modes and serial ports.
What were you using ARCnet for?
Microsoft was their "lender" of last resort https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/84258/date-1997-microsof...
Appliance style smart tvs? LCD screen based landlines? Maybe a world of GRiD or GO computing tablets with Penpoint OS running on the AT&T hobbit processor? Jerry Kaplan never writing his seminal book on the affair and the word "startup" never being widely used?
Canon and Brother having smarter word processors that take on the role of family computer? Everything run by Apple? Steve Jobs never getting muscled out and Omron introducing their Luna 88k to the US market, eating up the megabyte/megapixel/megapenny market that Jobs dreamed of?
Nolan Bushnell never selling Atari and starting Chuck E Cheese? The 1982 video game crash never happening? Acorn flooding the American market with their Arm machines running RiscOS and then getting their ass kicked by Amiga?
Quarterdeck DESQview taking off and being eaten up by Digital Research's GEM? RadioShack being the world's most valuable tech corporation with a stranglehold on every vertical in the industry only to finally get taken down by Be Inc? Ted Nelson's Xanadu running on Alan Kay's Dynabook with Jef Raskin doing the design?
Microsoft continuing to focus on video games and releasing an 8 bit competitor to the NES that could be used on Control Video Corporation's network who never pivots and changes their name to AOL? Gates snatches up the ID software crew who writes Doom and Wolfenstein 3D as Microsoft projects and Bill Gates is talked about in the same breath as John Carmack and Shigeru Miyamoto?
Meanwhile Gary Kildall, famed maker of CP/M becomes the richest man in the world and public enemy #1 in DOJ monopoly trials of the late 90s after he steals the top secret project OS/2 from IBM and clones it out from under them in project Windy City?
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder movie actually getting made?
From the far horizons of the unknown come transcribed tales of new dimensions in time and space. These are stories of the future; adventures in which you'll live in a million could-be years on a thousand may-be worlds!
Vernor Vinge's smart settop box as the computing center of the home never made sense. People connect video game consoles to the family TV because they play video games in lieu of watching TV. General-purpose computing can be and often is done in conjunction with the TV.
>LCD screen based landlines?
Only makes sense in the context of Minitel-style mass distribution of free terminals and centralized networks. The French state had economic and, more important, geopolitical reasons for pushing this; private US telcos did not.
>Maybe a world of GRiD or GO computing tablets with Penpoint os running on the AT&T hobbit processor?
Newton proved that it wasn't practical in 1995 to deliver accurate handwriting parsing in a consumer-level computing device, and that was by a company with enormous experience with consumer-level computing devices.
>Canon and Brother having smarter word processors that take on the role of family computer?
Only if they are ever willing to go the extra mile and develop OSes that support third-party applications, while providing developer kits. (Yes, yes, Brother did release a couple of PC-compatibles, but all it had to do was to license MS-DOS like every other clone maker.) There's no reason to think that the Canon Cat would be any less of a bomb in a PC-less world.
>Everything run by Apple?
In offices, yes. The IBM PC singlehandedly pushed Apple IIs out of corporate America. Desktop CP/M only worked in the SMB market because of VARs and SIs; Fortune 500 needed, if not a brand name it trusted (IBM), a company that seemed professional (Apple). Cromemco, Vector, IMSAI, and such never had the professionalism or market share to get themselves into boardrooms.
A possibility is prepackaged CP/M boxes filtering upward from Osborn and Kaypro once they get beachheads into businesses via their sewing machines. But even were that to happen I suspect that the lack of a single 5.25" disk format is alone enough to prevent widespread CP/M adoption.
>Nolan Bushnell never selling Atari and starting Chuck E Cheese?
Happened before 1981. The best outcome for Atari, really, is Armonk deciding in summer 1980 that Boca Raton and all other IBM facilities are too hidebound to develop a successful inexpensive PC, and instead going ahead and full-fledged buying Atari from Warner Communications. IBM decides to follow the System 360 model and uses the 8-bit computer line as the center of an entire line of products, everything from a next-generation videogame console (the 5200, except in 1982 and 100% compatible with existing 8-bit software) to dumb terminals for businesses to the high-end 1450XLD mini-workstation.
>The 1982 video game crash never happening?
Only if Atari (whether IBM-run or not) puts out a Nintendo-style licensing system enforced by lockout chip. The problem is that third-party publishers would just focus on Intellivision and ColecoVision instead. The model only works if everyone does it.
>Acorn flooding the American market with their Arm machines running RiscOS and then getting their ass kicked by Amiga?
Acorn was completely inept at marketing in its home market. Even with government subsidies and status as quasi-official "British home computer" the BBC Micro's market share was far smaller than Sinclair and Commodore, and comparable to Amstrad despite its late entry, and as you indicate the Amiga and ST crushed the RiscOS boxes in the UK too. Commodore UK may have start to finish been better marketers than the US parent, but there's no reason to think that Acorn US would have been any better than in its UK parent; the brief attempt to market the BBC Micro in the US is evidence of that.
>Quarterdeck DESQview taking off and being eaten up by Digital Research's GEM?
No IBM PC = No DESQview.
We might have, however, seen Concurrent CP/M and MP/M continue CP/M-80's co-dominance of the business market outside Apple.
>RadioShack being the world's most valuable tech corporation with a stranglehold on every vertical in the industry?
Absolutely not. Radio Shack almost willfully throwing away a natural monopoly in the US personal computer market is among the biggest missed opportunities in history. One Tandy Tower got lucky with the TRS-80, then did everything possible to ruin it. It got lucky again with the Tandy 1000 then got run over by the rush to zero margins that hit everyone else in the US industry outside Dell, Compaq, and HP.
Even without the PC, by 1981 Apple had surpassed Tandy by encouraging third-party developers despite the latter's huge early lead and massive proven supply and retail chains.
>Microsoft continuing to focus on video games and releasing an 8 bit competitor to the NES that could be used on Control Video Corporation's network who never pivots and changes their name to AOL?
I know you especially don't mean this to be serious, but ... this isn't completely crazy. Without the PC, Microsoft remains focused on programming languages with small consumer (Adventure, Decathlon) and hardware (Z80 SoftCard) businesses. I know I said that the settop box model doesn't work for general-purpose computing, but I can see ex-P&G marketer Ballmer convincing Gates and Allen that a locked-down videogame console with a razor-and-blades model is both a good moneymaker and a way of getting the Microsoft brand into homes.
>The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder movie actually getting made?
I'd like to see on the big screen that unnamed developer toiling away in the background, subtly getting more and more stressed, until sometime in act 5 he suddenly quits leaving that resignation letter on Tom West's desk. Maybe Netflix will do a miniseries.
We're supposed to be travelling in the world of our creation and what we'll see will defy explanation. For instance desqview would have run on some imaginary DOS like system that would have been created in the power vacuum of the mid 80s.
We have to assume that IBM was a suffocating force on the industry and without it, there's more room to succeed. There's cascading consequences that all have high variance.
Just don't ever try to make an IBM mainframe boot PC-DOS with a CGA font and do black on white on an IBM 3278... Ever...
Jesus! Didn't they have technical advisors in production?
I don't think the IBM PC pushed Apple out of enterprise sales. Apple didn't want to go into those places.
Steve Jobs was fired by the board of directors at Apple because (among other things) was going to screw up any corporate deals that Apple might wish to pursue.
I haven't any direct evidence, but I managed a medium sized corporate network of Macintosh computers in early 1990s. Their attempts at telling a coherent story for business systems was a bit of reality distortion field, Sculley-style. Ironically, their network server play was a partnership with IBM, rebadged RS/6000 crates.
So hmm, maybe sufficiently counter factual to play in this alternate reality -- but I think it would be more likely in business systems to see network of workstations from Sun or Apollo take some wins. DEC VAX servers, oh boy!
Apple absolutely did want to go into those places. But not at first.
Apple began in 1977 by aiming at the hobbyist market; basically, people like Jobs and Woz's fellow members of the Homebrew Computer Club. (Despite selling electronics parts, Radio Shack always aimed—or, at least, claimed to aim—at small businesses with TRS-80.) VisiCalc came out of nowhere and suddenly made the Apple II—the only platform it ran on for its first 12 months, because Disk II was a ridiculously better floppy system than any other home computer—a business machine. While corporate IT buyers never made bulk purchases, and Apple never built up a corporate sales force, the II appeared on a lot of desks as people saw what VisiCalc could do and rushed out to buy it with their own money or departmental funds.
Apple's intention with the Apple III in 1980 was to offer the successor to the II that would fix all of its faults regarding the business market, such as lack of native 80-column displays, lowercase, numeric keypad, more RAM, and larger storage. The III was a bust, though, and people kept buying the II. The PC in 1981 destroyed the already anemic III sales, and completely ended corporate II sales.
>I haven't any direct evidence, but I managed a medium sized corporate network of Macintosh computers in early 1990s. Their attempts at telling a coherent story for business systems was a bit of reality distortion field, Sculley-style. Ironically, their network server play was a partnership with IBM, rebadged RS/6000 crates.
Completely different world. By that time Apple had long since given up directly competing with PCs and clones in the mainstream corporate market, and focused on the areas it remained strong in: Graphic design, publishing, and other "creative" markets. The Apple-branded network servers were one of the brief times it tried to widen enterprise sales; Xserve is another example.
>So hmm, maybe sufficiently counter factual to play in this alternate reality -- but I think it would be more likely in business systems to see network of workstations from Sun or Apollo take some wins.
Yes, that's something I could have mentioned in my list of alternate paths. Not Sun or Apollo workstations on every desk—far too expensive—but after 1985 or so X Window or NeWS boxes on every desk is viable, and then perhaps something like Sun Ray. We could have had in 1995 everyone being able to walk up to any terminal at work, put in a smart card, and have their current desktop appear.
It'd be DR's MP/M, or Microsoft's Xenix.
> There's cascading consequences that all have high variance.
Indeed. This possible future forks all over the place because the PC market was quite chaotic at the time. It's absolutely impossible to predict with any sort of certainty what would happen.
One prediction I haven't seen is MSX. MSX had the potential to commoditize the home computer segment (and leech money out of every manufacturer the same way they did with the PC)
>It'd be DR's MP/M, or Microsoft's Xenix.
Agreed. Similarly, Microsoft gave up on Xenix once AT&T was allowed to enter the computer market, but had it not gone all-in on OS/2 then Windows in the latter half of the 1980s, Microsoft would surely have at least pushed its concurrent DOS outside its Europe OEM niche.
>One prediction I haven't seen is MSX. MSX had the potential to commoditize the home computer segment (and leech money out of every manufacturer the same way they did with the PC)
I considered mentioning MSX in my long reply but did not because the absence of an IBM PC would not have affected its success. In the UK, MSX was an also-ran compared to Sinclair, Commodore, Amstrad, and BBC/Acorn. In the US it appeared despite everyone in the early 1980s expecting/dreading the inevitable Japanese invasion of the home computer market. MSX only became significant in markets like Japan and Brazil where, for one reason or another, competing Western home-computer standards were not significant. And it never moved outside the low end; MSX never precluded (for example) PC-88, PC-98, or X68000 in Japan.
As the Minitel experiments progressed in multiple countries, there'd be demand for something like CompuServe for cheap terminals like those. Imagine that, instead of Bloomberg/Lexis and other specialized terminals, one could just to all that from a single minitel-like terminal. Or personal computers with Teletext built-in (like the BBC micro, or the Philips PC2000 for instance).
> We might have, however, seen Concurrent CP/M and MP/M continue CP/M-80's co-dominance of the business market outside Apple.
They also had CP/M-86, CP/M-68K, and CP/M-8000. IIRC, there was a standard graphics package for it that could serve as the basis of GEM, provided Apple made a Mac or Lisa to inspire them. The Apple /// and the Lisa would have failed spectacularly the same way they did in our timeline.
IBM could have bought Atari (their Atari 800-based PC mock-up is a beauty!). IBM had also their colorful home computer concepts that look pretty advanced even for today.
> Without the PC, Microsoft remains focused on programming languages with small consumer (Adventure, Decathlon) and hardware (Z80 SoftCard) businesses.
I think they'd try the MSX thing - licensing the same design to every electronics manufacturer eager to enter the home computer market, then milk them while they race to the bottom competing in price.
That's well and good, but the fact is that Minitel and similar efforts didn't take off anywhere it was tried outside France. Efforts in Belgium, Germany, Ireland, and Nebraska all failed. Why? Because no one, outside the French PTT (i.e., the French government), jumpstarted the network effect by distributing millions of terminals for free. The one exception was Britain, and that was done by mandating that all new TVs supported Prestel.
>I think [Microsoft would] try the MSX thing - licensing the same design to every electronics manufacturer eager to enter the home computer market, then milk them while they race to the bottom competing in price.
I see what you mean; without DOS, maybe Microsoft would have pushed MSX in the US as well as in Japan.
It's not impossible. The PCjr was announced in November 1983 but developers like Sierra On-Line knew about it a year in advance. Perhaps that knowledge caused Microsoft to not push MSX in the US.
The counterargument is that Microsoft pushed MSX in Japan because it saw an opportunity in a yet relatively untapped market, with neither home computers nor game consoles having wide penetration yet. This was not true in the US, where Commodore, TI, Apple, Radio Shack, Atari, Coleco, and Mattel were already present. They all entered the market before the PC in August 1981 except Coleco, and I doubt the ColecoVision's introduction was affected in any way by the PC's existence.
Everyone expected "the Japanese"—that is, Japanese consumer electronics companies—to enter the US home computer market in the early 1980s, but the Japanese did not because by then the aforementioned US companies were a) already present and b) (with the exception of Apple) incredibly aggressive on price. None of that was contingent on the PC's existence.
If IBM wouldn’t do it nor other producers, we would be locked down in multiple closed systems.
As much as I loved Amiga and I like MacOS and iOS, I wouldn’t want a world without alternatives.
8 bits/16 bit Amstrad - Commodore - Spectrum - Apple - Amiga
It was a good thing a standard evolved.
Yes, the PC world is chaotic, messy and generally "suboptimal", but during that time in early to late 90's the PC platform simply left everything else in the dust, cheap home computers, expensive UNIX workstations (and Macs, which have been their own category basically). Of course the progress was completely unguided, and 90% of everything was crap, and of the remaining 10%, 90% were just ok, but the remaining brilliant 1% were enough for the "actual" computer revolution.
Disclaimer: am still an Amiga fanboy by heart.
You only need to take a look at the "carefully curated" Play Store and App Store to realize that 90% of everything is crap, since that's the Iron Law of Everything, but now we pay 30% to the gatekeepers because... why not?
I swear every company everywhere, since the 90's, and especially in software, has CEOs swearing they're not going to be the "dumb pipes" and become utilities, in order to extract the "maximum value for shareholders", while we get nickel and dimed for everything and frequently get lower quality for it.
I'd much rather a BBC Micro instead of a 5150 or an Amiga or Archimedes instead of an AT.
So I'm not sure how they managed to survive.
And what about that sweet, sweet 80387 FP co-processor? Ever have one of those?
There was a video game which had an entire section of it available only if it detected an FPU: