8 May
2009
8 May
'09
2:06 a.m.
On 7 May 2009 at 22:23, Warren Wolfe wrote:
That depends upon what one means by "establish
the market" in this
case. As *I* would define it, a hardware market is defined when many
software companies write software for that hardware platform. It only
took IBM to "establish" the market by this definition. Business
people, that is, people with money, were buying into IBM PCs from the
beginning. They had been frightened by the instability of various
"business machines" at that time. (Note the Sphere, for example)
They did not want "orphan" machines, and were confident that IBM would
not leave them in the lurch. And, with the increasing amount of
high-quality software for the platform, its success was guaranteed.
The clones were INDICATIVE, rather than DETERMINATIVE, when it comes
to establishing the market. Only successes get cloned. And,
incidentally, the first clones weren't very good.
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. 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.
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.
I suspect that Intel Aboveboards owe their success to 1-2-3 as much
as anything.
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.
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.
IBM was miserable at the beginning doing PC sales. We walked into
the IBM sales office on Arques in Sunnyvale early in 1983 and put in
an order for a dozen 5150s, loaded (not hard to load, considering
there were only 5 expansion slots and the only "multifunction" card
IBM offered was the MDA). The sales office staff couldn't tell us
when to expect delivery--6 months was their best guess. And nobody
in that office knew the first thing about options or software for the
thing. To get what we needed, we went to Computerland in San Jose.
They had our systems in a week and knew their stuff.
--Chuck