Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 16:59:33 -0500 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: Bob Willcox <bob@immure.com> Cc: chat list <freebsd-chat@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: How did the MSFT monopoly start? Message-ID: <15216.25797.153039.786261@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <20010807145112.C39962@luke.immure.com> References: <20010806142544.A64348@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <15214.52633.581653.632317@guru.mired.org> <20010807145112.C39962@luke.immure.com>
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[Context removed due to top posting.] Bob Willcox <bob@immure.com> types: > I am a 30-year (1965-1995) IBM retiree so you may want to take this with > a grain of salt as well. :-). > I never saw any ads claiming "Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM", > but that's not to say it didn't happen. I remember seeing them. I recall a picture of a man sleeping with that logo, the implication being that you didn't have to worry about being fired. I believe the comment about their sales tactics comes from "The Sun Never Sets on IBM". > IBM has always _fired_ people for violation of "Conditions of > Employment" (such as fighting, drugs on IBM property, etc.) or > non-performance. It was difficult, as with any large Bureaucracy with > deep pockets, though. The thing IBM had never done till the early 90's > (even throughout the "Great Depression") was to lay anyone off. That > changed, though. You're right - I misspoke, and it is indeed "layed off", not "fired." For the issue about being moved, see the aforementioned "The Sun Never Sets on IBM." Note that that deals mostly with the international division, which may have been slightly different than the US division. > As for the rest (IBM-PC being inferior, etc.) I can't really comment. > My personal experiences were apparently somewhat different from Mike's, > though. (I don't think that _any_ of the PCs available in 1981 were > particularly good.) IMHO the _most_ inferior part of the IBM-PC was (and > still is) the PC-DOS operating system. Unfortunately, in 1981 we didn't > have many alternatives, and they were all more expensive. The story about computerlands reaction to the IBM PC came from a history of computerland - possibly "Once upon a time in Computerland", but that doesn't sound quite right. In any case, at a time when Apple and CP/M-80 boxes were starting around $1000, the IBM PC showed up at nearly $2000, offering no obvious advantages. You could use more than 64K for a single program, but memory was so expensive that the point was nearly moot. For the price of an IBM PC with 128K you could get a high end CP/M system with bank switching, allowing you to use extra memory as disk cache. That same hardware could also run MP/M, meaning that you could buy a multi-user system - one user per bank - for not a lot more than the cost of a single-user IBM-PC. We had pretty good luck selling those to small offices - if we could get to them before they bought an IBM-PC. The real winner was OS/9, running on a 6809 system. Here you had a system that could compete with apple or CP/M on price, except it was running a multitasking operating system with a Unix-like kernel and architecture. Radio Shack eventually released a version for the Color Computer, which could be made multi-user by simply plugging a terminal into the serial port and starting a shell on it. High-end boxes used multiple 6809s - basically one per card - running OS/9 for things like graphics processors, I/O handlers, etc. Since OS/9 was designed to be anb embedded OS - and is still available as such, at least in the 68K version - this worked fairly well. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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