Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC
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> Eventually, it was Wilkie who made the first move. Overwhelmed with emotion, his eyes red and swollen with grief, he stepped forward and detached the red rosette from the lapel of his suit jacket. It was the same one Don had given him years before. Leaning down, he gently placed the rosette on the casket.
It feels like there should be a movie made about this story...
So many times a relatively small upstart team with enough freedom will accomplish greatness, only for corporate culture to completely destroy what was.
How many misfit teams failed?
Which is not to defend corporate hyper-control at all. But I suspect that knowing how often skunkworks projects work, and how success can be affected by different personalities and corporate contexts, might be useful information.
Good thread in /r/AskHistorians: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kxnd1/what_...
"Heroism doesn't scale"
This wisdom of it was instructive (and you can see it in Estridge's early struggles with success), but so too was the sense that perhaps this "wisdom" was part of what underlay Microsoft's malaise of the late 2000s against Apple and Google (and IBM's in this story and your final comment.)
You can pretty much replace Heroism with Leadership or whatever.
Question is do we really need it to scale?
Corporatism thrived off the back of the industrial revolution. It is not bad, it just has taken us as far as it can go.
Something more decentralised and organic should take place instead of corporatism for large scale human development and space exploration.
I was lucky to be at MSFT during what might have been the last gasps of when a single person could have a huge impact, and it was something I saw from time to time, but it by the 00s and surely the 2010s, it was in huge decline vs the stories that were told about the 1990s.
Edit: Someone posted below about how Windows 3.0 was also a misfit project.
There is also F#, which has had a huge impact on C#.
The entire async framework in .NET was originally developed by a small team headed up by one brilliant engineer.
Silverlight started as a project by a small team in Microsoft Research to see if they could shrink .NET's runtime down to be small enough to complete with Flash.
Some statements belong more to the glue than to History, and they should remind us this is a real-life-based * novel *. I especially noted this one: "nobody at IBM had any real experience with [microcomputers]".
IBM senior management was certainly reluctant, but "nobody"... They even had microcomputer products that hit the market:
- IBM 5100 1975, first IBM personal computer
- IBM 5110 1978, 5100 updated for a larger market target
- IBM System/23, under parallel development with the IBM PC and released 1 month before in July 1981: many of the IBM PC features are shared with or taken from it (8-bit Intel processor family 8080 vs. 8088, very same expansion connector, reuse of the electronic expansion cards such as serial, exact same keyboard - just in a different box and with different function keycaps...)
https://www.amazon.com/Fire-Valley-Making-Personal-Computer/...
This attitude was so short sighted. A friend of mines dad was using their Apple II for work-related spreadsheets and thought it was the greatest this ever. Not sure how IBM folks could not see this opportunity just because it was smaller scale than "what they did". 20 years later Intel seemed to have missed the mobile market due to a similar attitude.
Furthermore, in perfectly delicious irony, IBM's own modifications to Linux[3] to support the allocation of workloads to its giant server hardware have enabled the popularization of containers, further reducing demands for server equipment, increasing portability between desktop and server environments, and substantially drawing down the cost of provisioning for cloud services - the arch rival to traditional mainframe mentality. Today, in a world awash with dirt cheap and ever-present processing power and storage, as well as recently unimaginable levels of connectivity, we stand almost at the point where the term "server" itself has become an anachronism and consumption-oriented devices draw consumers toward "services" (often as paid for subscriptions).
IMHO some industries which will look nothing like today's version in 30 years' time: food, oil, transport, construction, clothing, health, and education. Carpe diem.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system) [3] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
But man is it ever hard to execute. Andy Grove made every exec at Intel read Innovator’s Dilemma, but still it was hard to turn that ship.
They thought it was a fad - that centralized systems (coincidentally, the machines they made) would be the computing platform that people would pay-per-minute/pay-per-hour/pay-per-month to access remotely. They wanted to be an information utility - a supplier to all - instead of selling a small, low margin box for one-time revenue.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
That's what you get at that level in a company that big. Anyone who is two or more levels from the top of the org chart and also two or more levels from the bottom lives in a reality that consists entirely of the attitudes and opinions of other people, weighted by each person's ability to impact their career. If they saw that the building they were in was on fire, their thought process would go something like: "Bob isn't here today because he's at that sales meeting. When he hears about the fire he'll downplay it as something minor, so I shouldn't evacuate or he'll think less of me. But Bob's boss Don is here. If Don evacuates and I don't, that might Don feel embarrassed and emasculated, and he'll take it out on Bob. So I need to evacuate if and only if Don evacuates. Bob won't mind me evacuating if Don does it. But Don's office is on the other side of that wall of approaching flames. Shit. My only chance is if he's in a meeting on this side of the building, so I can track him down and see what he's doing. Let me check his calendar real quick...."
Reminds me of Kodak.
The level of foot-shooting by IBM on that one was ridiculous.
Pretty sure for a long time it was "cloaked" as stop-gap solution, a continuation of the lesser-known "windows runtime embedded in application" option that some software shipped with.
The first release of OS/2 was a complete disaster. IBM was inundated with calls from customers who were having issues. They pulled every single person on the site into service as customer reps, without any training in OS/2! I was working on a UNIX project at the time and I was an Apple person - I had no clue how to help people with OS/2 or PCs but my manager did not like it when I tried to explain that. So I probably am listed somewhere as the worst OS/2 customer support person ever.
But you didn't hear the other engineer respond, "No, no, you don't understand. This is an advanced prototype using functional programming. Moving the document to the trash would have side effects. Creating a copy and placing that in the trash can, however..."
Bureaucracy can be like that. Big bosses who might be really interested in increased profits rely on their subordinates to see the market, but subordinates are risk averse and don't want to change anything. Add corporate politics, people fighting not for innovations or for a market share but for promotions, and you'll get the picture.
It seems to be that they besides all that they were ideological, believed that size does matter and scorned on those who made computers smaller than theirs. Ideology means that people would have troubles to see anything that contradicts their ideology. Peer pressure, social desirability and all these things set up individual biases.
I encourage everyone to get a copy of the Hercules emulator and a copy of the "Turn Key 5" MVS distribution and spend a little time using it. The mainframe idea of "computing" and "running jobs" is so comprehensively different it's really hard to map any previous consumer computing experience into it. It's also just a lot of fun because of that.
The whole experience is centered around efficient use of machine resources while providing a comprehensive batch execution and scheduling system for centralized job execution in this environment. The level of accounting, reporting, repeatability, and job language features is actually something worthwhile to dive into.
In any case, I'm willing to bet that IBM's internal ideology is that end users wouldn't want to do the computing themselves, but would instead go to middle men who would would purchase computing either directly from IBM or as some form of "remote job entry" through a third party provider. To that end they were rapidly building out the infrastructure to do just that.
> Intel seemed to have missed the mobile market due to a similar attitude.
In both cases, they're still here, although Intel did a much better job of catching up to their past mistakes.
What was common though then and now was renting computers.
Essentially, cloud computing.
I remember in 2010, having to present to a team of Mainframe techs at a bank about how we would be integrating an Identity solution (that ran on Windows servers) into their Mainframes.
They couldn't stop making comments about how useless Windows is and it's just a gaming platform. One guy ranted and raged so hard that he stood up and stormed out of the room.
I remember my Project Manager who was in the meeting looked at them and said 'Guys, we talked about this earlier'...
I can see where that mindset comes from, these guys have been drinking the IBM Kool-Aid for a long time
Those views seemed to be relatively common. Just look at those home computer upstarts, many of which were scrambling to make business machines. Apple's follow ups to the Apple II were the Apple III and Lisa, both intended for business. Commodore seemed to have business computers on their plate most of the time. Tandy also pursued the business market. TI was a bit of an outlier in that they were into minicomputers before personal computers, and quickly jumped ship when they turned out to be low profit. Maybe it was different in Europe, but certainly not in North America.
I'm not entirely sure they were wrong either. A lot of companies rose then fell in the home computer market. IBM themselves haven't pursued the home market in decades at this point. Many, if not most, segments consolidated to the point that there was just one company with any meaningful market share. It could even be argued that the real money these days isn't in the hardware or software for the home market, but in the services they enable access to.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines_Flight_191
This was the crash that brought the term "microburst" into the national consciousness.
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/water-wind-and-fire-the-...
There is very little penalty for being wrong. There is often a huge penalty for being right, if the powers-that-be opposed you.
Miami, and South Florida overall, is kind of a crazy place to be. Every couple of decades people out west or from up north rediscover we actually exist. There are good engineers here but the West and Northeast have loads of money. So once CS/SWE really took off as a career the companies down here couldn't/wouldn't compete. Trust me, if you were an Asian/Indian kid in Florida in the 90s and told your parents you wanted to work in software they were going to beat some sense into you.
I've watched money flood into the area and then get carried back out when the financial tides changed. I always imagined Miami could have been kind of like a Silicon Valley but the politics, money, geography will work against it.
As someone who had IBM as a client for a number of years, we observed that there seemed to be a lot of IBM folks who basically ended up in some Siberia in one form or another.
All competing architectures were better than IBM PC architecture, PC BIOS was bad, chosen processor instruction set was the worst, MS-DOS operating system was bad. Only the keyboard was good.
What made it winner was open architecture, 80-column screen and IBM name.
You can buy brand-new keyboards with this mechanism now from some small business (sorry, don't have a link handy), but even they offer Model M-like layouts because the original Model F layout is so awful.
The only good thing I can say about the Model F layout is that almost all microcomputers at that time had terrible keyboards, though the reasons they were terrible varied. Compared to junk like the Atari computer keyboards, it probably seemed great, though of course the IBM PC was far more expensive. For really great keyboards, at that time, you had to look at the business-level terminal keyboards and such.
A PC with 80 columns card, 64KB of RAM and a floppy drive cost about the same as an Apple II Plus with the same specs (US$2,700).
A BBC Micro would set you back about US$1,500 (£900). It didn't offer slots, but did have 80 columns standard. It also had a lot of ports.
You couldn't even argue that the 8088 was much faster than the 6502. BASIC ran a lot faster on the 2MHz Beeb than on the PC.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that the people who bought it on launch were planning to use more than 64KB of RAM (which was rather expensive then).
i think ibm's reputation was a pretty important factor, not so much for making people buy it (though it did do that) but for convincing them that other people would buy it. it's easy to forget in 02024 just how dominant, and how malignant, that ibm was in the computing world at the time. they'd built aiken's first computer at harvard, they'd introduced ascii (then spent decades battling it—the pc was their first ascii product), they'd invented fortran, they'd invented relational databases (but kept pushing ims), they'd provided the hardware lisp and timesharing were developed on, and they utterly owned business computing, more thoroughly than microsoft does today
pretty quickly there was a lot of software out there for it. partly this was because programmers were convinced that users would buy it, but also, it was easy to port cp/m software to it. at a time when 'serious' pc software was almost entirely in assembly, you couldn't do that with the apple ][+ (unless you bought another computer from microsoft to plug into one of its slots to run cp/m). also, it was easy to make peripherals for it (though this was just as easy for the apple). and microsoft licensed ms-dos to other vendors like tandy and zenith, resulting in not-quite-compatibles like the z-100 (01982), the dec rainbow (01982), the tandy 2000 (01983), and the sharp pc-5000 laptop (01983). the software written for those machines was also usually easily ported to the ibm pc
you know how ebay and airbnb are utterly dominant because they own a two-sided market? if you want a place to stay, you go on airbnb because that's where the listings are, and if you want to rent out a place to travelers, you list it on airbnb because that's where the travelers are? the ibm pc owned a three-sided market: users, software vendors, and peripheral vendors. not at first, of course, but pretty soon; the s-100 systems weren't that dominant in a market fragmented between apple, commodore, atari, osborne, kaypro, etc.
then, once compaq came out with their ibm-compatible portable computer in 01983, ibm didn't own the market anymore. even less once phoenix started selling their bios in 01984. and that was what really made the ibm pc catch on: no single company's missteps could sink the platform the way commodore did with the amiga and the way apple did with the iigs's successors. ibm did in fact try to avoid introducing an 80386-based ibm compatible in order to avoid cannibalizing their minicomputer and mainframe lines, just as apple did with the iigs, so compaq beat ibm to market in 01986. by like a year!
there are also technical questions. the 8088 is a lot faster than the 6502 at running compiled c, especially with the crappy compilers of the time. it's also noticeably faster at numerical code. and the apple ][+ was running its 6502 at 1 megahertz, not 2. the beeb not having slots was a fatal flaw for much of the market; it turns out there are really a lot of peripherals that work badly over a serial port
and once ram prices came down a bit, 640k of ram became standard; the macintosh shipped with 128k in 01984 and quickly changed that to 512k. using 640k of ram on the 8088 was a lot easier than using it on a 6502, although intel's braindamaged segmentation scheme (avoided on the iigs's 65816) forced you to use 'garbage kludges' like lim ems (01985) to use more than a megabyte at all. that there was so much pressure to be able to use more than a megabyte as early as 01985 should tell you something about how far memory prices had come down and how important it was that the 6502 and 8085 couldn't handle more ram
you went to a big company they ran IBM. you want to get the same kind of computer 'that they use at work'. and what they have at work is IBM.
like this concept just makes no sense whatsoever in todays culture. computers used to be secret. they were tools of the priesthood. you wanted to join the priesthood. thats why you got IBM.
its like coming to America, you want to learn to speak English. not Esperanto.
Most people in the early 80s had no idea what to do with a computer at home, that's why they mostly were bought by enthusiasts, tinkerers, and gamers. I remember one of the main uses listed on the boxes was "keeping track of recipes." Haha, imagine spending thousands of dollars for a giant clunky thing to organize recipes when a box of index cards would do.
> Unlike all of its major rivals—including the Apple II—the IBM PC was built > with an open architecture.
The Apple II, designed by Woz, is famously open, to the point the original model came with full schematics and ROM listings which made it trivially cloneable. I'm curious why this isn't considered an open architecture.
Just like posting source code does not make the code open, publishing schematics does not make the design open.
it's true that eventually Apple started suing people, but until Apple vs Franklin it was unclear if you could even copyright a BIOS. And once that was determined, people had to clean-room reverse engineer the BIOS but it was possible to make clones (see the Laser 128 and many many others)
this is just as open as the IBM PC was. You couldn't just drop a copy of the PC bios into your clone, you had to go to a 3rd-party reverse-engineered BIOS
They were actually pretty cool computers; half the price of the name brand Apple while being mostly fully compatible with all the software. I've only played with one once, but I thought it was pretty cool. Sad that VTech only makes crappy kids toys now.
The clean-room approach was a neat hack that solved the problem, but it was hard to find people that had never seen the IBM source and could prove it.
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-comp...
> The easiest way to set that standard wasn’t just to sell machines; it was to let other companies sell parts, software, and even whole computers that would be compatible with your machine. Unlike all of its major rivals—including the Apple II—the IBM PC was built with an open architecture.
The Apple II was effectively as open as the PC. And IBM didn't want clones any more than Apple did. Both the Apple II and the PC were eventually legally cloned, and neither company could do anything about it.
I'm not even sure IBM is a great example. It had a really rough stretch but is still there as a very profitable dividend-paying large corporation even if it's not considered cool.
my favorite screwdriver shop (PC parts, cases, cpus, fans, etc) just closed. one of the last in the city. decline in business.
So bad I couldn't finish the series.
and what fiction have you ever written?
I lived through that era, too. As historical fiction, HACF is pretty decent. "areas unrelated" -- hello, it's FICTION about a specific era, and, without knowing what specifically you're talking about: maybe those "unrelated" areas are period-setting, or character-developing.
HACF not for you. Let's leave it at that. You can't please everyone.
The "history" the show goes over is crammed into it's Drama first story. The history is there for nostalgia bait, not to celebrate the history or educate. That's why pretty much everything interesting that happened in computing was mangled into coming from the same like 5 people.
And the characters are all just narcissistic assholes who are self destructive because it means the show gets to carry on for another season. It also has the cliche density to feel like a high schooler's homework project.
If you find yourself addicted to reality TV drama, you will enjoy it.
Imagine if you tried to take "It's always sunny in Philadelphia" seriously, and also were watching it because you cared about Philadelphia history. I felt actively patronized the whole time.
Season 2, though, I couldn't watch.
I didn't find it a perfect show--especially latterly--but it captured a lot of the era, such as COMDEX, pretty well.
The character of Cameron was highly inspired by Romero. In fact, the book Masters of Doom is kind of a blueprint for the show in some ways
Thanks for the reminder to rewatch it. I really need that show now.
The second season seems to become the typical personal drama / relationship / betrayal / writers kung-fu story arch / etc. that every series comprising more than one season seems to spiral into these days.
So, highly recommend the first season!
> but was yet to announce he was gay (took another decade)
I don't know why this detail was included; not that it's anything to be ashamed of. It just doesn't seem relevant at all to the other points you have raised, and seems a bit insensitive or judgemental imo.
IIRC, the company itself promoted the use of "Digital" rather than "DEC", with the latter being accident of funding availability when it was founded.
Re. classic PC shutdown emotive, character mud-slinging focused response below, check again: I did not state an opinion, I did exactly the opposite. Unsure what you think you are "calling me out" on - all I expressed was a (very public) fact[0] (furthermore, about which discussion has been intentionally invited), and when questioned, expressed the purpose for doing so was an interest in sharing that fact for others, since it is historically notable with respect to distinction from the current era. If my interest in sharing is now a matter subject to your offense, feel free to be offended, but don't post about it.
I realize the latter part of the GP comment was provocative but please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40598981.
It’s insensitive/judgmental in my view to casually mention the public disclosure or lack thereof of someone’s sexual orientation as a curiosity to be commented upon. The original commenter characterized their lack of coming out of the closet as some kind of moral failing or incongruity by juxtaposing it alongside other life changes that are matters of personal preference and nearly commodity-level interchangeability (their clothing operating system choices). This is problematic because of the implication that being “out” is a mere personal preference with minimal stakes, and is offensive because it is close to shaming them for not being out sooner, and close to saying that sexual orientation is a choice, which is a known right-wing talking point and dehumanizing to many in the gay community.