Re: Seeing VERSIONINFO under Vista?

There was a good reason that the Intel chip was chosen.

Intially, the choice was to use the Motorola 68000 series. So they went to Motorola and
said "We need to buy <whopping big number> of chips over the next several months, with a
continuing ned at the rate of <other whopping big number> of chips per month for the next
<n> years."

Motorola was already making 68K chips for the Mac, and declined to bid on the contract. So
they went to Intel with the same order, and Intel said "Sure. We'll even build a new fab
line if we have to". So there really wasn't a choice; those were the only two viable
architectures of that era. Zilog was commiting corporate suicide because of the huge
number of bugs in the z8000 chip; National Semiconductor was characterized by a friend who
was building big multiprocessors at the time as "There's only one thing worse than having
NS as your second-source for chips. Having NS as your *prime* source for chips". AMD
wasn't really in the game at the time, and there were no viable chip sets. Had Motorola
decided to bid on the contract, we might have been using 68K-based chip sets and Motorola
would be the biggest semiconductor suppllier in the known universe. So they shot
themselves in the foot on that one. Don't blame IBM; they had very limited options at the
time.

OS/2 was produced by Microsoft. When the decision was made to abandon it and rewrite the
OS portably in C, IBM dug in their heels and said "no way! We HAVE to support the 286!"
Eventually, Microsoft just handed them the source code and said "have fun, guys".

Note that IBM screwed up the most critical part of the development world. To program for
Windows, you could spend $250 for the Windows SDK and the C compiler, and you could write
code. If I wanted to write code for OS/2, the SDK cost $3,000. So nobody bought it, and
everyone developed for Windows. Had IBM any clue at all as to how to create software,
they would have given the OS/2 SDK away free, and tens of thousands of developers would
have writen OS/2 apps. But only major corporations could afford the OS/2 SDK, and
therefore there was no software for the OS. So why would people buy it if the number of
apps was so limited? Answer: they didn't.

I made some comment about the '286 to a professor I knew, who asked me what I thought of
it. I said (in summary) "it was a chip designed by someone who paid close attention to
his computer architecture professor and believed everything he said. But he missed a
serious dose of reality, so the chip was actively hostile to operating system designers."
He looked offended and said "The designer of the '286 was my best student". I said,
"Well, you are a great teacher, and he believed you. But you forgot to tell him about the
real world of hardware design. And you *know* better!"

The incident about the no-PCs-from-IBM was in the early 1990s. Pre-Lenovo. IBM really
didn't understand channel distribution, either.

In the era of RT11, I was working on operating systems we wrote ourselves.
joe

On Thu, 24 May 2007 14:13:33 +0100, Daniel James <wastebasket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article news:<h0g95398oehp0mvob4mtv48k0cc09nb8dl@xxxxxxx>, Joseph M. Newcomer
wrote:
[I wrote]
... MS would have lost quite a lot of ground to OS/2.
****
I doubt that completely. OS/2 was being marketed by IBM, which has to rank
as The Most Clueless Personal Computer Company In The Known Universe.

I must admit you have a good point there!

When the creator of the IBM PC was killed in an airline crash, ...

About two years too late to save the world from the legacy of the awful Intel
segmented architecture ... IBM even couldn't even get that right.

IBM wasted years trying to build a version of OS/2 that would support the 286,
and this gave Microsoft the time to create Windows (in fact, the reason MS
abandoned OS/2 was that Gates wanted to simply dump OS/2 and build Windows in
partnership with IBM, but IBM would not hear of any strategy that would not
provide support for the 286, even though by that time the chip was already
obsolete).

IIRC the big problem was not so much the '286 (though that was significant) as the
APIs, which IBM wanted to look like their SAA but Microsoft wanted to be
compatible with Windows 2.x. The 286 version of OS/2 was almost entirely developed
by Microsoft (for IBM, but not by IBM) and it was only after the huge success of
Windows 3.0 that MS felt able to tell IBM to push off. I have a set of original
disks somewhere for Olivetti OS/2 1.2, and there's nary a mention of IBM in their
docs. OS/2 1.3 was the last '286 version, and that was an all-IBM product.

I agree that it is mindboggling that either Microsoft or IBM should have bothered
to write anything specifically for the '286 -- Steve jobs was not wrong when he
called it "a brain damaged chip".

A retired IBMer said it was very sad when he went to local stores and saw
signs saying "IBM PCs" for sale, but not a single one was manufactured by IBM.

Er, can you say "Lenovo"?

My ThinkPad is lovely machine, it's a 1GHz Pentium III manufactured by IBM at
their Greenock plant in Scotland. Great hardware. I bought it from IBM UK's (new,
and short-lived) web store. When I rang them up a couple of weeks later to ask
them when they were thinking of sending me a machine, and for that matter an
invoice they denied any knowledge of an order -- they said they had me on their
database as a customer, so I must have bought something, but they didn't know what
and could I please tell them what I'd ordered and how much I had been charged for
it! The telephone order worked (and they did honour the special web-order price)
but I would think twice before suggesting to anyone that IBM had any clue at all
about running e-Businesses.

IBM created the affordable personal computer, then essentially abandoned the
market to their competitors.

That was deliberate ... or part of it was. They wanted the architecture to be open
to encourage third party hardware and software developers to produce products that
would add value to their PC. They relied too much on the idea that their PC would
be the PC of choice because of their reputation for build quality ... the fact
that "entry systems division" (as it was known internally) grabbed so much market
share so quickly shows that they were partly right ... but they hadn't realized
how much the clones would undercut the 'genuine' PC, nor had they understood that
businesses would take the view that if a clone cost half as much as an IBM it
didn't really matter if a few of them failed.

I tried to install NT on my laptop, but it wouldn't install. The laptop wasn't
certified.

Bad luck. Lots of things work that aren't certified, though.

That Tosh of mine does have a sticker saying that it was designed for both NT and
Win95 ... but it also runs XP and linux quite happily.

DOS was a file management subroutine library.

You're *still* flattering it! <smile> ... but if you've ever worked on RT-11 then
you might think that DOS looks quite advanced.

Cheers,
Daniel.








Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
.

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