28 Sep
1998
28 Sep
'98
10:09 p.m.
On Tue, 29 Sep 1998, Sam Ismail wrote:
From him I learned that the IBM 5100 was actually a
knock-off of a
computer called the MCM-70!! The MCM-70 was manufactured by a Canadian
company, and included a CRT, tape drive and APL in ROM. It was marketed
at the insurance industry. IBM, having a big stake in the insurance
industry, needed to come up with a product lest MCM take over the market.
So they answered with the 5100, which basically was a rip-off of the
MCM-70. Knowing this, it explains why IBM, a company which shunned
personal computers until 1981, would have come out with a "personal
computer" in the 1975 time frame. They wouldn't have done so unless they
were forced to!
The nice thing about these stories is that they're all different --
everybody has their own spin. When I asked the guy who headed-up US sales
of the IBM 5100 about his story, it was that the 5100 was in response to
machines from HP and Wang, and that they lost to those machines on price
(the IBM 9830, for example, was about $10K for a similar setup). IBM was
simply not used to competing based on price/features.
BTW, CBI has lots of MCM docs in their archives. I'm not familiar with
MCM at all, but I got the sense that they always played in the insurance
niche, and always did fairly well there.
-- Doug