Re: Seeing VERSIONINFO under Vista?

See below..

On Tue, 29 May 2007 12:33:30 +0100, Daniel James <wastebasket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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.
****
For failing to have a crystal ball? That's what I'm objecting to! "Blame" implies a
deliberate decision or set of decisions to build something that had self-limiting
problems. They did not do this, so "blame" is a meaningless term to apply.
*****

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.
****
Again, other than having a crystal ball and the ability to predict the unpredictable with
100% certainty, how could they have had any idea that the introduction of the PC was going
to have the impact it did?
****

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.
****
It was a small team with a modest goal and a small budget, relatively speaking. My
impression in talking with ex-IBMers (former employees or retired researchers from T.J.
Watson), the entire personal computer phenomenon was something beyond the wildest
imagination of anyone alive at the time. There was no "different department" issue; there
was ONE SMALL GROUP IN BOCA RATON with a well-defined goal to produce an affordable
personal computer with a specific set of features in a limited time frame. Period. You're
into the "conspiracy theory" world again, and it doesn't fly.
*****

I'm certainly not "asking [anyone] to have made different judgements in
retrospect" -- just assigning the blame where I see it as being due.
*****
Due to whom? This is where I think you are completely wrong. The concept that there is
even someone to "blame" is already a flawed concept, so anything based on that
fundamentally flawed assumption is nonsensical.
*****

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).
****
Oh, the reason for that is simple: the only crystal oscillator that was available at the
price and quantity required was one used for TVs, which used a 4.77MHz oscillator! Again,
parts availability and pricing were dominant issues here.
****

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.
*****
Clueless, certainly. The only ineptness was in not having an open-collector/open drain
interrupt line so that interrupts could not be shared. But in that sense, nobody else of
that era had a clue either, so they were not alone.
*****

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.
*****
Absolutely. Motorola clearly screwed up; had they bid the 68000 to spec, they would be
the semiconductor powerhouse today, and Intel might not even exist. So if you are looking
for clueless and inept people, Motorola is the most likely company to point to in that
era. By choosing to opt out, they forfeited the game.

Note that comparing the 8088 to a Core2 or an XScale ARM is sort of silly, since those are
MUCH later architectures, and both critically depend on silicon and fabrication
technologies that did not exist in 1980. In fact, RISC machines were still a
hotly-debated topic. But, as I tell my students, "architecture matters not at all to
compilers, developers, and end users. Only hardware geeks care about architecture. From
a software perspective, all we care about is wall-clock time. Those of you who want to
debate RISC-vs-CISC, the debate is dead. RISC won the Architecture Wars. CISC won the
Proigrammer Interface wars."
*****
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.
*****
Yes, I knew about that. The problem was that it was still a /370, which deservedly LOST
the Programmer Interface wars (although I have a friend, now in Cleveland, who is still
writing /370 code, does a lot in assembly code and works a lot at the kernel level. I
haven't programmed the architecture in at least 35 years)
*****

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).
*****
One of the problems in comparing PCs to mainframes is that mainframes tend to run
massively-I/O-bound code, and until recently NO x86-class architecture could come within a
couple orders of magnitude of mainframe I/O bandwidth. The NUMA x64 machines, however,
have essentially destroyed the advantage mainframes held there, and a machine equipped
with a couple $3000 Adaptec cards is now in the same performance range as many
mainframes,but is a fraction of their cost. So having a 68K-speed CPU that ran mainframe
programs made no sense, because a single-bus PC (even a Microchannel architecture) simply
did not have the I/O bandwidth to run most mainframe apps. And a FORTRAN programmer
really doesn't care what architecture is executing FORTRAN.

Godon Bell (designer of the PDP11, among his many accomplishments at DEC) discovered this
back when he was working for a supercomputer company. Who buys supercomputers? he asked.
Well, NOAA and DOE (Livermore, for example) use them, but who else does? Animation
companies (the first Cray-2 went not to Livermore, but to an animation company in Los
Angeles), but his question was, how do you market them more widely. Well, a researcher
who needs supercomputer time might get a $5000 budget to use one. At that budget, he
could get 30 seconds a day of supercomputer time. Most of them could get their answer in
less than 30 seconds of supercomputer time. OK, fine. But what if you ran the same
application on a 386 box? Well, it would take 24 hours to compute! But you got the same
number of results, one per day! And $5000 would buy you a 386 to use for your scientific
calculations and you'd have enough left over to buy ANOTHER 386 for everything else, so
you'd have one dedicated machine that produced one result per day, same as the
supercomputer! He looked at the growth rate and realized that this was likely to remain
true into the indefinite future.

Supercomputers do have their uses, but there aren't very many of them. They're still
expensive, and you can really only justify them if you have massive budgets and massive
computing need. Otherwise, arrays of PCs will do the job.
joe
*****

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

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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