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

Wed Sep 22 16:26:04 EDT 2010

I feel a wave of reminiscing coming on .. ! 

Started off in '82 with a Sinclair ZX81 with the wobbly old 16K (count 'em !) RAM pack. How we laughed as one over-excitable press of the punch-sensitive membrane keyboard wobbled the RAM pack off the bus connector and lost an hour's worth of typed in program... The ultimate ZX81 high was when some lunatic worked out how to make a ZX81 make sound. The ZX81's main advance on its predecessor the ZX80 was that the 81 had two modes - fast and slow. In "fast" mode, it switched the display off to spend all the CPU time running code. Said lunatic worked out that if you turned up the volume on the television set and switched the the 81 in and out of "fast" mode, you could make the television buzz something approaching musical notes, and wrote a little program that would turn the ZX81 and television set into the most bizarre "synthesiser" of all time. Madness.

I remember going "cor !" when someone turned up at school with one of the very first ZX Spectrums that made it out to customers; this was the real game changing moment for the UK, as the real home competition was between the Spectrum and the Commodore 64 (Vic20s being a bit cheap'n'nasty and compared to ZX81s, and BBC Model Bs only being for "posh" kids with too much money - in reality we were just jealous that they had Elite way before we did !)

I think the US got the ZX81 as the Timex Sinclair 1000, and the Spectrum as the Timex Sinclair 2000 ? (All the Sinclair machines in the UK used to be assmbled at Timex's plant in Dundee here in Scotland, which probably explains that tie-up.)

After a brief detour via the Enterprise 64 (an under-appreciated near miss home computer) and the Sinclair QL (much much better than people really gave it credit for at the time), I shored up with a Commodore Amiga 1000, which I admit to gawping at open mouthed when I first got it up and running (multi tasking ! lots of colours ! really detailed graphics ! speech ! decent sound ! real development tools ! blimey !!) Later I got an Amiga 1200, but while it was a leap ahead of the A1000, it was nothing compared to the leap from the early home computers to the A1000.

After that, and some choice encounters with such delights as DEC's VAX-11/750 & 780 with various versions of VMS & Ultrix, PDP-11s and Olivettis running various Unixes, various Sun-2 and Sun-3 workstations, a Symbolics LISP Machine (less than affectionately renamed the "Shambolics"), I wound up dealing with IBM big iron.

What a nightmare.

We had a 4361 mainframe, running VM/SP release 5, VM/CMS release 5. We had two strings of five disks, each the size of an old fashioned spin drier unit, offering either 558Mb (ooo!) or 712Mb (wow!) of disk space. We had two laser printers (one a cold fusion and one a hot fusion), an impact printer and four 0.5 inch tape drives, for which perishing rubber hoses in the vacuum paths were a constant worry. The 3270 console had a big red STOP button on the keyboard, and boy it meant it - you pressed STOP, and everything ... well, it really did stop. Which was fine, but it would literally take a full business day to get the thing back up and running if you had to IML then IPL the contemptible thing. The field engineer had his own private room on site, complete with workbench, lathe and various power tools, all of which would prove necessary to keep this thing running.

But that was as nothing compared to dealing with IBM, because IBM knew they had you right over a barrel with this kit. There was no real choice for anything; your hardware came from IBM, your OS came from IBM, your software came from IBM (and you rented it by the month), your support came from IBM... You could get third party help from consultants, but they would be both expensive and ok'd by IBM - so basically, IBM pretty much ran your world and you just fitted in with it, whether you particularly liked it or not. No wonder we all jumped on the open systems bandwagon as soon as we could, simply to explore the wonderful world of *choice*. 

And to me, this is where the Apple/IBM comparisons come in. Apple, for whatever reason (some say good because Apple wants to provide a consistently excellent all round user experience, some say bad because Apple wants to run your whole world for their profit) are headed down that route where they control the hardware you can use, the operating system you can use, and increasingly the applications you can use on top of it - in pretty much the same way IBM used to run your mainframe world top to bottom. Some folks (who want things to "just work") will probably rub along quite happily with that. Those who prefer to choose more for themselves are going to get pretty tired pretty quickly of bumping into Apple's rules and regulations, and if Apple aren't careful they may well reap the same kind of whirlwind IBM did in the early 90s.

(Oh, and to finish the story off, after a gap of several years, for a while we went back to buying IBM kit for running Unix-based applications using AIX. Things really hadn't changed in dealing with IBM all that much in the intervening years !)

And after all that, the two computing devices I have most fondness for are probably my Amiga 1000 (which I still have) and ... yep, my MP2000U, which still gets used every day, and is still subject to "what's that ? ... wow !" conversations - I've even been stopped in train stations by people asking to take photographs of it ...

Nostalgia. It ain't what it used to be.

- Tony

-----Original Message-----
From: James Fraser <wheresthatistanbul-newtontalk at yahoo.com>
To: newtontalk at newtontalk.net
Sent: Wed, Sep 22, 2010 8:34 pm
Subject: Re: [NTLK] OT: was C64 on app store? now Is IBM evil?

Hello,

--- On Wed, 9/22/10, Michael Grossman <ceratoph at SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> wrote:

>No graphics, pathetic speaker, expensive software, expensive hardware add 
>ons... And it cost 3-5X what the competition did!

Well, I'll agree with you on that last part, anyway.  That was why the clone 
manufacturers ended up eating IBM's lunch: they could offer the same thing, but 
for less money.

Business people are nothing if not cost-conscious. IBM, in its rush to get the 
PC to market, used mostly off-the-shelf components (rather than designing 
everything from scratch, like they usually did).  Unfortunately for IBM, what 
they could do, other folks could do, too, and for less money (as you point out).

Bad for IBM, but good for everyone else. Apple experienced the same syndrome in 
the mid-90's with Power Computing and the other Mac clone makers.  However, 
Steve Jobs, shrewd businessman that he is, (was?) saw what was happening and 
pulled the plug on licensing the Mac OS to third party clone makers.

That meant that Apple could go right on charging a premium for what they had to 
offer, as there was no one around to undercut them.  It also explains why Apple 
has only controlled roughly 10% of the computing market from the mid-90's all 
the way through to the present day. Apple, like the old IBM, is not afraid to 
charge for their stuff, and it shows. 

> It was obvious even to a 12-year-old that IBM PCs were definitely not >ready 
for home users or the classroom.  

No offense, but that's hardly surprising, seeing as the IBM PC was never 
directed at home users or the classroom: IBM was known as a company that 
produced -business- machines, and the IBM PC was no exception.

The PCjr was IBM's first serious attempt to break into the home market (we all 
know how that one went).  The jr was a severely compromised machine (the chiclet 
keyboard was simply horrifying, for one thing).  This would have been okay, but 
the home computer market at the time was positively cutthroat (as that link to 
the Apple//c vs. PCjr war indicates).

As far as the classroom goes, the educational market has always been Apple's 
forte, not IBM's.  The only reason I ran into PCs in school back in the 
mid-Pleistocene was because the CIS majors needed to have access to the same 
types of machines they'd encounter in the business world. 

>The over-priced behemoth sat on a desk while a vibrant trade in pirated >C64 
games and apps developed underground amongst the students.  

Sir, I don't think IBM developed the PC so that schoolkids could trade pirated 
games for it. :)

I understand where you're coming from, but you're really talking apples and 
oranges here.  The PCjr blew chunks, certainly, but the original IBM PC had a 
fairly high build quality because, well, that's what people expected from IBM.  
If you ever come across an original IBM PC in a junk shop, check out the 
keyboard on it, then contrast it to what Apple (and just about everyone else) 
offers as a "keyboard" nowadays.  You'll find yourself shaking your head.  

(Better yet, find a keyboard for the later model IBM PC/AT, get an appropriate 
PS/2 adapter for it, and you'll have a keyboard you can use for life.  No jive.)

In short, IBM offered staid, boring machines to staid, boring people who did 
staid, boring things to make lots of money (well, to make money, anyway).  The 
C64, on the other hand, was a computer than someone who was plunked down in 
front of an IBM PC at work looked forward to messing around with at home, where 
they weren't expected to do staid, boring things with it, but whatever they felt 
like doing (usually programming, music, and games).  Apples and oranges.

Don Estridge was the guy who headed the research team that came up with the IBM 
PC.  I'll give you some idea of the esteem in which Steve Jobs held him:

In 1983, Jobs not only offered Don Estridge the position of president of Apple 
at $1 million a year, (this was 1983; a million dollars a year was an enormous 
salary back then) but -also- a $1 million signing bonus, -and- $2 million to buy 
a house; Estridge turned him down. 

http://www.thocp.net/biographies/estridge_don.html

As I say, I understand where you're coming from, but please do not underestimate 
the ability of staid, boring people to do very exciting things.  To be honest, I 
didn't think all that much of the IBM PC at the time, either, but now I'm 
grateful that IBM made practical, cut-price computing a reality for a large 
chunk of the population with the introduction of their machine (even if it did 
come about solely as a by-product ;)

Best,

James Fraser

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