Jan 82 article abt the IBM PC

Raymond Moyers wrote: Why? I didn't get a kick out of it then. The IBM PC is a reminder that history is not always a pleasant thing. It is a slap in the face to all those who pioneered the low cost, personal computer years before it came along. Not just garage-tinkering techs and entrepreneurs, but big corps., mass-producing. It succeeded not because it was better, but because it was acceptable to the kind of person who nowadays looks down their nose if you don't have a fax number, but still refuses to correspond by email, and because everyone grasped that immediately in 1981. Including many who should have known better. Including some who already had better machines in the same class on the market that cost about the same to build, but were priced as much as 3-4 times higher. To be more specific, it succeeded by the cachet of 3 letters that IBM was either willing or unable to prevent others from coattail riding upon, especially by copying the hardware. Perhaps the open spec helped, but that would have been reverse-engineered as was the BIOS. If IBM had contracted with Commodore to put a VIC 20 with expansion slots in a grey steel box it would have done as well, and we would all be awaiting the imminent release of the 64-bit 6502 now, instead of IA-64. I won't knock the machine itself. It was okay, though some of the cost compromises were highly questionable, even for the time. It was however a poor choice for "the" industry standard. Particularly the system bus. Especially when more than one already existed, with hard won formal specs and all, that didn't lock everyone into a single CPU family. jbdigriz