The story goes that when the IBM PC-AT was demonstrated to IBM insiders, the minicomputer people (System-36) freaked out. This $5,000 PC (cheap at the time) was about as powerful as their 6-figure minicomputer line. They complained to head brass, and as a result for quite a while IBM offered only an 8-MHz version, while Compaq cleaned their clock with cheaper, faster 12MHz clones and established a dominant position in the market.
(Anecdote - my dad did 50x50 matrix solutions as part of some physics work he did; he had a version of Fortran that ran on a PC. These would chug for 48 hours on the AT. He bought a 486DX and tried to run his program. He came back from making a cup of coffee and it was sitting at the prompt. After trying for a while to find his error, he checked the data files and realized that thanks to the math coprocessor, what used to take 2 days now took 5 minutes. )
No claims about accuracy, but the first season of AMC’s show Halt and Catch Fire is about creating a PC clone and touches on at least some of the legal issues.
I worked on PC’s and mini’s (sys 36) in the 80’s, and although the cpu in the pc may have been equal to or possibly even better than the cpu in the 36, that wasn’t really what made a mini like the 36 valuable. It was the IO, multi-user OS, database, etc. etc.
But there were certainly functions being performed on the 36 that the PC easily replaced including spreadsheets and work processing.
IBM made one crucial mistake in regards to the PC:
[ul]
[li]The never saw it (or its software) as a consumer product[/li][/ul]
You have to remember that although today Intel is as recognizable a brand as McDonald’s or Nike, back then they were just a small, totally obscure chip-maker. Texas Instruments had a thousand times more brand-name recognition as a chip-maker from their successful line of consumer products (hand calculators). But you also have to remember that although it seems arrogant today, back then this didn’t make the slightest bit of difference, because IBM equaled Computers. The two were synonymous. There was nothing especially brilliant about the x86 or PC architecture, the reason for the original PCs success is absolutely, 100% due to the IBM brand name being attached to it.
But IBM was not in the consumer electronics biz, and they had no desire to be. They saw no market for PCs in the home. And by the time they realized there was, it was too late. Their PS/2 line was a flat-out bad hardware design. Instead of performance or innovation all it brought was patent-protected hardware (i.e. the micro-channel bus) to try and recapture the home market by sheer force alone. And even though on the software side their entry, OS/2, was a very good product ahead of its time, it was again too late. Microsoft had a lock on the consumer PC software market with the release, promotion and success of Windows 3.0.
IBM actually sold a lot of PS/2s, just not to consumers, instead mostly to businesses and schools. They did have a big winner for nearly a decade with their ThinkPad laptops, but again they fell behind because they just weren’t a consumer products company. Five years or so ago they finally called it quits and sold their entire consumer PC products line (Lenovo) to China.
In the early days, when Commodore PET, Apple, and Radio Shack TRS-80 were duking it out, they were the leaders in home computers and their sales to 1980 could be measured in the tens of thousands. That sort of volume was totally irrelevant, especially as they had no hard disks and did not have the memory capacity to do spreadsheets - and diskette drives would put the price far above what hobbyists could afford.
It was when 8088 computers came out with 100+ KB of RAM (Up to 640KB!! Bill Gates himself wondered why anyone needed more than that) and could store appreciable spreadsheets or do word processing that the business world took note.
One of the problems Atari struggled with was third-party game makers. Some hurt the bottom line by producing better games, like Activision. Others undercut brand by producing crap games. There were even a couple pornographic games which were a desperate embarrassment. But Atari wasn’t able to shut down the other game programmers because in a lawsuit a judge ruled that the Atari OS was not patentable–he simply couldn’t comprehend that a bunch of ones and zeroes could constitute intellectual property.
Not sure if this bears directly on the discussion, but it seems somewhat relevant.
Until the IBM Personal Computer (where the “PC” name originated), there was absolutely no standardized hardware design. Let alone operating systems.
(before they were "PC"s, they were “Microcomputers”)
IBM did not do anything new or revolutionary - but, by sheer size and market penetration, they did:
Convince businesses that “microcomputers” were valuable tools that they MUST have*
Set a standard for architecture. No more squabbling about the hardware design.
in 1981, I did some work for Levi Strauss. One of the buildings on the campus was filled with boxes of IBM PCs. They had no idea what they were going to do with them., but they knew they HAD to have them. 100’s of PCs awaiting assignment.
The PC’s were assembled according to a fairly standard design based on the way the chips from the manufacturer were designed. IBM used a standard plug for expansion cards, they did not have any special check in the BIOS program to prove they were “genuine IBM”, and so on. Basically, they assigned a bunch of guys to go off to a separate facility away from the regular IBM crowd and put something together.
I think partly the market penetration came from -
(a) they were IBM; in those days, that meant a real business machine, not this “Apple” toy or “Radio Shack” cheapo.
(b) the market was waiting for an indication of which way the PC was headed. IBM’s entry gave it a “decision” - sort of like if everyone produced their own style of video cassette or such - the one everyone thinks is going to win, will win. IBM’s entry pointed the way. Everyone assumed it would win.
(Consider music as an example. Many manufacturer and music publishers hated MP3 - it could not be copy-protected, for example. There were a dozen music services and proposals to try something different. None got more traction than MP3, so MP3 it is. )
The perceived wisdom was that by ensuring that the market was open, it would help the success of the IBM PC. Of course, no-one could forsee how large the market would get - the PC industry then was much, much smaller. IBM saw the PC as a niche.
I met one of the team that designed the IBM PC. It was all conceived and built in a very short space of time - as people mention, with off the shelf parts that were available.
As someone mentions above, they tried to licence much more closely, once the PS/2 came out - including, a Microchannel bus and the lovely but long forgotten operating system, OS-2. By that time, the horse had not only bolted but was buying Compaq with the rest of the world.
Wikipedia list of Apple II clones. Wikipedia sub-article about Apple II clones. Article about how the legal fight over one particularly successful Apple II clone led to a landmark legal decision over the copyrightability of ROM-based firmware, as well as binary (compiled) software. (This is now part of the bedrock of precedent in the case law of computer engineering law.)