The IBM (I've Been Mulling) PC

Chuck Guzis wrote: Had the PC been only a business computer, it would have been like the other "business computers" (not the hobbyist ones) and not made sufficient headway in the market. I strongly disagree. Business was leery of fly-by-night companies, irrespective of the quality of their products. Again, see Sphere Computer. Business viewed the whole PC industry as, well, flaky. That is, they viewed it as flaky until IBM showed up. THEN business got involved with PCs on a grand scale, and has never looked back. A lot of the software available for the PC at the beginning was nothing more than code ported from the x80 world--heck, PC-DOS was pretty much that. Agreed (PC-DOS was a hot copy of CP/M, plain and simple) -- but irrelevant to the point at hand. It takes time to ramp up software production. Software companies were willing to write software, and businesses were willing to buy machines, based upon the idea that IBM would support them for at LEAST five years, and would remain in business at least that long. That was better than anyone else at that time. So, the magic triangle of manufacturer, buyer, and software writer was complete, and growing at each leg, if you'll pardon the anatomical mental picture. Until Lotus 1-2-3, that is. Business people bought PCs for 1-2-3 the same way they'd bought Apples for VisiCalc. It might not be an exaggeration that clones were so successful because they could run 1-2-3 as well as a PC could--and 1-2-3 ran only on PCs. And it ran very well on 5160 clones. Well, when a clone could run both 1-2-3 and Microsoft Flight Simulator, they would sell well. I suspect that Intel Aboveboards owe their success to 1-2-3 as much as anything. Agreed. AST, Tecmar, and others as well. The PC was a stable platform. If we had been left with IBM as the only proponent of the PC, it might well have been just a memory, like the 5100. Again, I strongly disagree. The very nature of IBM involvement in the PC market projected stability, and encouraged both hardware and software extensions to the PC environment. I'll confess that when the 5150 came out, I thought I was out of my mind buying a 64K 5150, instead of a nice complete well-built system like a NEC APC. But if IBM was difficult to deal with, NEC was impossible and kept technical details to themselves jealously. Yes - Kudos to IBM for an open architecture. That was VERY uncharacteristic of IBM in general. IBM was miserable at the beginning doing PC sales. Hee, hee.... Agreed, totally. It was fun to make them squirm, though! To get what we needed, we went to Computerland in San Jose. They had our systems in a week and knew their stuff. Sure, but let's be fair, though... Most people didn't walk into NEC (or Exidy, or any other) offices, either -- most sales were (mercifully) handled by computer stores. Warren