Re: Seeing VERSIONINFO under Vista?

In article news:<27rl531h1adc5l9sf927fn5jbria222f2t@xxxxxxx>, Joseph M. Newcomer
wrote:
That was not a relevant consideration. The PC was seen as a "niche product"
that would NOT be a serious threat to the main business. The fact that it
became so was totally unexpected. You are asking a company to have made
different judgments in retrospect, and that is not possible.

Not at all. This very interesting side-discussion started when you said "Don't
blame IBM". I'm just explaining why I do blame IBM.

In particular, I blame IBM for not understanding that the PC was NOT a "niche
product" -- I bet a lot of IBM execs have blamed themselves for that, over the
years, too.

This is all a little unfair of me as IBM is (and was) not an individual, but a
huge company with many departments, some of which undoubtedly did have a good
idea how successful the PC would be and what its potential would be, while
others clearly didn't. However, that there was no overall planning and no
coordination of these different departments' efforts is ... IBM's fault.

I'm certainly not "asking [anyone] to have made different judgements in
retrospect" -- just assigning the blame where I see it as being due.

Remember, we are looking at chips that had maximum clock speeds of around
2MHz, but the PC, using a 4.77MHz chip, actually EXCEEDED almost anyother
"personal computers" of its day.

Well, ... a Z80 actually ran at 2, 4, or 6 MHz (depending on model) and a 4MHz
Z80A did most things faster than a 4.77MHz 8088, but I take your point that the
PC ran at a faster clock speed than all the 8080, 8085, and 6502 machines that
came before it. Even so, when the PC was new many people asked why the 8088 was
run at "only" 4.77MHz (IIRC intel sold it as a 6MHz part).

You, and a lot of other people, seem to think that IBM deliberatly crippled
the PC. This is simply not true.

No, I just think they were clueless and inept. If think they might have crippled
the PC if they had been able to see into the future and see what impact it was
going to have on the mainframe business ... but I'm sure they had no idea at all
that that would happen.

What, by the way, is "crappy" about the chip? Right now, Intel produces
the fastest consumer chip on the planet.

The 8088 was not a Core 2 CPU, nor was it an XScale Arm chip. Intel caught the
ball around the time the 386 came out and have not dropped it since. Before the
386 they sold some right turkeys of CPUs ... and, thanks to IBM, they sold a
hell of a lot of them. They probably owe their preeminent position in the
microprocessor market today to IBMs decision in the 1970s.

Yeah, segment registers were a pain, but since they've been gone for
nearly 20 years, I think this is largely an irrelevant consideration.

It would be if were talking about now. We're not, we're talking about 25-30
years ago.

You really, really don't get it, do you? When the PC project was
conceived, NOBODY, not in IBM, not outside IBM, had the FOGGIEST IDEA this
was going to happen.

That is EXACTLY the point. IBM, of all people, should have understood the market
in which they were operating well enough to predict what would happen.

IBM does not make computers, it makes money. The computers are secondary, they
are the means by which the money is made. Making money is a business that
depends on marketing, on market analysis, and on prediction. What happened to
IBM with the PC was the biggest horror story the IT industry has ever seen --
not just because of the damage the PC did to the mainframe business, but because
of the opportunities IBM missed with the PC business.

despite being an over-engineered, under-designed piece of rubbish build
around a chip designed for a completely different purpose
****
Exactly what purpose was that? The 808x chips were general-purpose
computers!

The design of the 808x is clearly the design of a machine intended to run <64k
processes and task-switch between them. Yes, they're general-purpose chips -- of
course they are, or the PC couldn't have been built around them -- but they're
not well-suited for handling more than 64k of memory at a time.

and marketed by a company
who had a major financial interest in its NOT being successful.
*****
Really? Intel wanted the 808x line to fail?

Not intel, IBM. Not the 808x line, the PC. IBM would not have wanted the PC to
succeed in the way that it did if it had understood the implications.

I was thinking more of the System370 on a chip, which was essentially a
tailor-made 68000 with a different instruction set ... that predates the PPC
by some years.
****
See my above comments on the /360 (and /370) architectures. Obviously you
never programmed these, or you would know they really were crap. It was
NOT a 68000, and there is absolutely no resemblance between the two
architectures.

No, I've never programmed a 360 or 370. I do know a bit about them as I have
some good friends who worked for IBM (some of them still do, in fact) with whom
I have discussed the mainframe architectures -- enough to know I haven't missed
much!

The PC XT/370 was an XT with a custom 2-board set containing two 68000 chips.
IIRC one was a stock Motorola part and the other had microcode that emulated the
370 instruction set -- there was an interesting Byte article about it in about
1983 but I threw it out long ago.

No, that's not the same thing as a system /370 mainframe, but it ran (some) /370
software (as well as acting as a PC and a 3270 terminal).

Some guy's restoring one here: http://www.xt370.net/

Cheers,
Daniel.













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