[NTLK] OT: was C64 on app store? now Is IBM evil?

[Andrei Chichak]

I don't think that it is fair to compare IBM's offerings to anybody elses. 

IBM was supplying the corporate market. The standard computer department management mantra of the day was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM equipment". It was quite true, the conservative, no brain, path was to buy IBM equipment. This was the corporate market where computers were tools that did things to make money. IBM supplied the computers, operating systems, applications, programmers to change the applications, field support engineers, installation techs, sales people to take you golfing, finance people to figure out how to pay for it, computer architects to figure out how to make a machine to fit your needs...somebody has to pay for that and it's going to be companies and government.

A C64 was a home machine. Commodore had already bombed in the corporate market with the PET. Commodore had also passed on Woz's computer once, as had HP. They were now playing catch-up in a market where there was perceived growth.  It was very hard to compete with IBM, because there was very little logical thought going on in the purchasing of corporate computer equipment, you couldn't get into the market and the support costs were very high, nobody was going to bring in their computers to get fixed, they called somebody in to fix it right now!

As for IBM in the "home" market; IBM tried to produce a less expensive computer for the consumer, the PC Jr., it was slow, fragile, expensive, and bombed. IBM didn't understand the home market and the others didn't understand the corporate market. There was a lot of cross buying, for sure, a lot of home market people bought PCs and PC clones, a bunch of home machines went into the corporate market (we used Atari 520STs at a bank that I worked at). 

A lot of the home machines in the office broke since they weren't designed to be used 40 hours a week (Atari 520ST). The PCs that went home should have been fully written off and replaced after 3 years, unfortunately for private people this doesn't happen. I don't have much sympathy for people complaining about how expensive professional equipment is that they want to use at home, you don't have the ability to write the cost off against profits as the professionals do. I also don't have much sympathy for companies that use home grade equipment in an industrial setting to save some money, most home equipment isn't designed to live the life of the industrial models.

As for the DOS being cryptic problem, that is a Microsoft problem, they made huge profits from their $10K investment, what would you do? It may have been a fragile, cryptic, subset ripoff of CPM, but people were buying it by the million.

I remember that the UofA bookstore sold something called Microsoft Xenix back in the early '80s, their version of UNIX. Yes, Microsoft had a UNIX clone. Xenix went to SCO, SCO bought UNIX from Bell after the breakup order, SCO sued everybody for using UNIX clones since they were holding the rights. Mac is built on an offshoot of UNIX. Things could have been sooooo cool, but it didn't happen. I figure that the home market buying IBM PC clones and latching on to DOS/Windows/GWBASIC has set the computing industry back 20 years, as well as completely trashing innovation and research.

Can you imagine the conversations between Intel and Dell or Asus? Intel would want to have Dell incorporate some new chip that would revolutionize computing, Dell doesn't want to change a thing, they sell millions of units a year, they don't need to innovate, they have shareholders to pay.

F=ma . The mass of a company like Dell or Asus or Intel or IBM is so huge that they CAN'T change directions without huge force being applied.

A

On 2010-September-22, at 9:47 AM, Michael Grossman wrote:

> On Tue, 21 Sep 2010, M. Horvat wrote:
>> I'd like to know what made IBM "so evil" in the 1980s. (I'm not from the 
>> USA, and I didn't even exist back then) Was Apple simply jealous of the 
>> IBM PC's success after the failure of the Apple /// and Lisa?
>> 
>> -Matej Horvat
> 
> I was a kid back then and it seemed incredibly evil and stupid that IBM's 
> massive corporate clout dictated hardware and software standards, yet 
> their software and hardware was the worst! There was a PC with a green 
> screen in one of my classes that cost well over $1000 in 1985. The teacher 
> couldn't figure out how to use it, and, once she'd gotten some boy whose 
> dad had taught him about DOS to teach her, it was obvious to all that this 
> white elephant couldn't hold a candle to C64 or even some of the crappier 
> 8-bit offerings like the Texas Instruments 99/4A. No graphics, pathetic 
> speaker, expensive software, expensive hardware add ons... And it cost 
> 3-5X what the competition did!
> 
> It was obvious even to a 12-year-old that IBM PCs were definitely not 
> ready for home users or the classroom.  The over-priced behemoth sat on a 
> desk while a vibrant trade in pirated C64 games and apps developed 
> underground amongst the students.  Kids would come to school with 
> shoeboxes full of napkin-sized disks and swap games. Made me wish I had a 
> C64 which was like $500. (I mentioned TI99/4A because I'd gotten one on 
> sale for $50 as TI abandoned the home computer. This 8-bit had some 
> serious hardware flaws and not much software, but hey it was $50 including 
> the cassette recorder.)
> 
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