Re: Seeing VERSIONINFO under Vista?

See below....
On Thu, 31 May 2007 11:09:20 +0100, Daniel James <wastebasket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article news:<u4gr53tnrdicehkjicgak2dl2731807gt4@xxxxxxx>, Joseph M. Newcomer
wrote:
ANd that's my point: their marketing department could predict in ten years
how many keypunches they would sell, but nobody foresaw the demise of the
card as an input medium!

I can't believe that that's true. As early as 1974 when I first had any
significant exposure to computers and punched cards we users all moaned that
cards were slow, cumbersome, heavy, easily torn, and unreliable; and we longed
to use interactive terminals to do all our data entry (of which there were too
few, and their use consumed computer time budget at an alarming rate). The
computing service, on the other hand, complained that cards were expensive,
bulky to store, and produced messy chad that was a pain to get rid of; and
longed to be able to tell the users to do all their data entry using interactive
terminals (or which they wanted to provide more, and support more of, and
support more functionality on).

Cards were unpopular with everyone, and were definitely on the way out.
****
Had you seen how "interactive terminals" actually worked on mainframes? IBM's model was a
multidrop system where when you hit <enter>, the keyboard locked. Then when the mainframe
polled for whether or not a terminal had anything to send, the terminal would indicate it
had pending data. The mainframe would then upload the data, and unlock the keyboard.

I actually wrote code that handled this sort of thing on a non-IBM mainframe; they'd
replaced their IBM mainframe, but couldn't afford to replace several hundred terminals.

And in the 1970s, most "glass TTY" terminals actually came with 3270 emulation modes
(usually as a high-cost option) so you could put them on a synchronous multidrop network.
The marketing department could predict with fair accuracy the rate at which these
terminals were replacing keypunches. They had all the data, the trend lines, the cost
information. etc., But terminals were really incapable of doing any real computations.
All real work was done on the mainframe.
*****

NOBODY had a clue that the PC would become what it has. I was in the
industry at that time, and we knew it could never be more than a niche
product.

You were in the mainframe side of the industry. Those of us who had been working
with PCs /sensu lato/ for years before IBM tackled the desktop KNEW that PCs
were growing in capability and importance. We KNEW that when IBM threw its
weight behind the desktop PC the world would tremble. The people inside IBM who
were responsible for bringing the PC to market knew that too, but their
colleagues wouldn't listen.
****
No, I wasn't in the mainframe side of the industry. We were looking at the future as
being in workstations, computers powerful enough to do real work. I had one of the very
early personal workstations in my office (a Three Rivers PERQ machine), and I'd had a lot
of experience already using Altos and D-machines available at Xerox PARC. We knew that
the mainframe was doomed; what we didn't see was the ferocious rate at which personal
computer technology would be able to compete with workstations.
*****

A belief that IBM "should ought to have had" people capable of seeing the
future is asinine.

IBM DID have people capable of seeing the future ... just not in the right
places.
*****
No, they had people who were looking at a future based on existing premises, and nobody
could envision the paradigm shift that the IBM PC would create.
*****

I disagree. Blame can be ascribed for negligence, not just for deliberate
acts.
*****
So I could be sued if a child climbs onto the roof of my house and falls
off, because I did not post a sign saying "Danger! Climbing to great
heights is dangerous!" on all four corners of the house?

In your country, you can probably be sued for it, yes.
*****
Actually, you can be sued for *anything*, but the ability to win the suit is problematic.
*****

I do take your point, though, that that is a situation in which people would say
"I don't blame you, you couldn't have known that little Billy was going to climb
up there".

That's a bit different from what we're talking about with IBM and the PC,
though. I think it's reasonable to assume that people won't treat your rooftop
as a climbing frame, but I don't think it's reasonable to think that other
people won't tread on your marketplace with rival products -- though I can
understand that people do think that, especially if you they occupied a position
of dominance in the market for so long that they have become lazy, arrogant and
complacent.
****
Remember, the "marketplace" was really, really small at that time. PCs at most needed to
simply be smart front ends to mainframes. Think of JavaScript without push technology:
local intelligence beyond the primitive capability of simple remote terminals, and whose
entire smarts were not embodied in unmodifiable firmware. One floppy drive at 360K bytes
was enough to load the software. It isn't even clear the PC designers had a clue as to
how successful their creation was going to be.
*****

Negligence assumes that there is a failure to take an action when the need
for the action is obvious. There was no need to do a massive market study
for a market as small as the personal computer market.

Joe: you're a great programmer, but you clearly know even less than I do about
marketing. You *always* need to study *everything*. Businesses can't afford
surprises. As you said yourself: this particular surprise cost IBM five
gigabucks. No magic was needed to avoid that, just open eyes.
*****
Actually, if it hadn't been for the PC business, their loss would have been truly massive.
By that time, more than half of IBM's revenue came from PC sales. But that was 10 years
after the PC project was conceived.

I actually know a fair amount about marketing. My father was a salesman, VP sales, and
ultimately CEO of a nontrivial company, and you can't help but pick up a lot listening to
someone like that talk. My brother-in-law is in marketing in water treatment.

Note that by the time it became apparent that the PC was a success, the architecture was
essentially frozen. Look at the notable failures by companies that didn't understand this
simple lesson.

The MicroChannel bus (a proprietary bus). The Macintosh closed architecture. The
Itanium. The DEC Rainbow (a PC clonoid that was not PC compatible).

If Apple had understood the market, they would own it. They didn't understand it, and the
result is they are a minor player these days. (They still manufacture an MP3 player
without a field-replacable battery, making it impossible for someone who does long plane
flights to use it. So their market is people with more money than sense).
*****

Cheers,
Daniel.








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