It's All IBM

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From: Arapahoe (now_at_playing.playing)
Date: 07/06/04 

Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2004 01:54:19 GMT

When you really boil it down...in the last 60 years of computing...it's
really all been IBM.

I mean, I've been reading this book "Hackers" which goes through all the
*underground* computer movements and DEC, and Altair and probably if I
bother to keep reading, Apple and so on.

But you know, as I see it -- basically computing is divided into 3 epochs.

I) The IBM Mainframe - 1950 to 1980

The Mainframe was all that really mattered in computing for those 30
years. You could take all the /hacking/ and DEC and minicomputers and
flush them down the toilet and what would be left is the real computing.
  The computing of commerce and industry that really /comupterized/
America. The computing of Defense and Simulation.

And 99 percent of that was on IBM mainframes.

II) The IBM PC - 1980 to 2000

The basic architecture of the PC that is used by 96 percent of the world
was developed by IBM -- and that architecture is still in use today.

The IBM PC is 2nd to the mainframe in design and importance in
computing. Apple is about as important as the Altair. A trivial
implementation, before IBM came up with the machine that Corporate
America really wanted.

III) IBM and Linux, 2000-???

Oh, did you notice that I left Microsoft off this short list? That is
because IBM was planning a PC with a multitasking OS as early as the
1960s. They called it basically a Smart Terminal because it could
offload some of the server processing. And that's about what most PCs
do, because real processing is done on servers. As far as Microsoft
goes, I see them as a transitory period -- basically allowing PC
hardware to mature up to the point that UNIX -- a reall OS -- could be
allowed to run on PCs. And now it does.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Microsoft vs. Apple innovation
    ... Gates came up with the idea of an OS that would work on IBM clones. ... end branch of personal computing that died off in the late 1980s. ... Looking at net profit -- which is the only thing that really matters ... its vision of bringing the PC to every household and every office ...
    (comp.sys.mac.advocacy)
  • Re: smttter IBMdroids
    ... I never worked for IBM, ... building supercomputers for technical computing. ... There are probably many possible taxonomies for computing, ... That's why itanium got so much of my attention and maybe ...
    (comp.arch)
  • Re: smttter IBMdroids
    ... I never worked for IBM, ... building supercomputers for technical computing. ... There are probably many possible taxonomies for computing, ... business computing are category b. ...
    (comp.arch)
  • Cell Computer now available to Public.
    ... Now you can have a Cell computer... ... IBM today announced that it is making its first computing system based on the Cell Broadband Engine generally available on a global basis, with early adopters such as University of Manchester, RapidMind, Inc. and Fraunhofer Institute deploying compute-intensive applications on early ship versions. ... The IBM BladeCenter QS20 is a Cell BE-based blade system designed for businesses that can benefit from high performance computing power and the unique capabilities of the Cell BE processor to run graphic-intensive applications. ...
    (comp.arch)
  • Re: Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.
    ... and reluctantly agreeing to make its IBM PC, ... Somebody did a "clean" rewrite of the IBM BIOS code by having Team A analyze the code and produce a specification for a BIOS; e.g. what it did but not how. ... Radio Shack and the TRS80 or "Trash 80" brought computing within reach of just about anyone. ... Radio Shack used tin on card edge connectors where they should have used gold, which made the machine somewhat less than reliable. ...
    (comp.os.vms)