IBM Did Not Invent the Personal Computer 293
theodp writes "As IBM gives itself a self-congratulatory pat on the back as it celebrates its 100th anniversary, Robert X. Cringely wants to set the record straight: 'IBM didn't invent the personal computer', writes Cringely, 'but they don't know that.' Claiming to have done so, he adds, soils the legacy of Ed Roberts and pisses off all real geeks in the process. Throwing Big Blue a bone, Cringely is willing to give IBM credit for 'having helped automate the Third Reich'."
Re:Yes, they did (Score:5, Informative)
Actually they didn't (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not by any measure was it the first (Score:4, Informative)
IBM put the first real personal computer on the market. Yes, prior to that I could have gone to the electronic store and bought the parts.
The only people who call this a personal computer are idiot geeks who will go to any stupid pedantry and verbal trick to 'be right' and 'know more'.
If the altair counts, then you must consider the Kenbak-1. So I win the internet.
From wikipedia [wikipedia.org] : "The original line of PCs were part of an IBM strategy to get into the small personal computer market then dominated by the Commodore PET, Atari 8-bit family, Apple II, Tandy Corporation's TRS-80s, and various CP/M machines.[2]"
Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC (Score:4, Informative)
S-110 Bus systems
Radio Shack TRS-80.
Apple I
Commodore-64
Atari-800
TI 99/4
These were all the first personal computers. IBM had nothing to do with any of it.
IBM's only claim to fame is that their hardware specs allowed others to make similar systems.. so the "IBM PC" became manufacturable by many companies... and as a result... it beat out the proprietary hardware guys.
IBM has invented many things, but the personal computer is nothing they invented.
E
Re:Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC (Score:2, Informative)
Also: Altair 8080, Altair 680, Imsai 8080, SWTPC 6800 and NS SC/MP were all well before Apple, Commodore, Atari, TI.
All those others were "me too, me too!" companies.
Re:PC Invention (Score:3, Informative)
The IBM was keyboard perfection:
Byte magazine in the fall of 1981 went so far as to state that the keyboard was 50% of the reason to buy an IBM PC.
IBM Personal Computer [wikipedia.org]
The original keyboard for the IBM PC was a pure piece of garbage. As a matter of fact, one of the early accessories that many PC buyers purchased was a keyboard from 3rd party developers, where important keys like the "enter key" was enlarged, along with the shift keys and a spacebar that actually felt right.
Re-read that article again, to realize how many people hated the thing. I hated it and told my professors at the time.... where they cringed in disbelief that IBM could produce such a piece of crap. One of the regular features in Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Mannor column was a review of a new keyboards to replace that piece of junk.
As if to add insult to injury, the PCjr decided to downgrade even this horrible keyboard that IBM made with something even worse. It was so awful that the CEO of IBM decided to apologize and sent a new keyboard to every customer of that computer which had registered with a warranty card. Surprisingly, this "replacement" keyboard for the PCjr was even superior to that horrible IBM PC keyboard.
Other things IBM did invent (Score:4, Informative)
IBM *did* invent a few other things:
Magnetic Hard Drive
Reduced Operating Instruction Set architecture
Transistorized DRAM
Relational databases
Virtual machine operating systems
DES encryption
Scanning tunneling microscope
To name a tiny fraction. So, they do have some bragging rights.
Re:Not even close (Score:3, Informative)
100% true, of course. The optional hard disks were made by Seagate (hence the legacy of the ST01 controller), the floppy drives were made by Toshiba or Chinon or somebody like that. The processor came from Intel. The optional printer was made by Epson. The motherboard was basically a reference design from Intel.
The BIOS was original, but the operating system, of course, was a 16-bit CP/M hack from a guy named Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products, who sold it to a tiny little company from Bellvue, Washington, for a few thousand bucks. Tim would go on to become a billionaire, of course, along with the founders of that tiny little computer company.
If I could go back in time, I would convince Tim Patterson that writing operating systems isn't a very good idea and he should do something else with his time.
Re:"Automate the Third Reich"? (Score:5, Informative)
Part of that business was supplying machines that kept track of concentration camp prisoners via punch card.
Was IBM all bad? No. But was it some bad, especially during the Nazi Germany days? Hell, yes! The historical record has proven it beyond reasonable doubt. Of course, Watson and IBM were not the only corporate or finance bigwigs who did that kind of thing at the time, but do it they definitely did.
Re:Invented -- no. Delivered -- yes. (Score:3, Informative)
Proud Italian Americans tend to say, that once Columbus discovered America, it stayed discovered.
But that's not a good analogy for IBM's contribution to the PC. The fact is that the PC was already there, and had a decent market, and was starting to make dramatic inroads into small and medium businesses thanks to the PC's first killer-app VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet program). This program first ran on the AppleII and propelled Apple from a small (actually fairly dominant) enthusiast company to Silicon Valley's latest wunderkind. This was well before IBM got into the marketplace. But everyone knew they would, considering the surge, and the rapidly expanding business market. The thing was that at the time, IBM's entry was met with quite a bit of disappointment. We were all expecting great things, but that was decidedly not what the 1st IBM PC was. A run of the mill CPU married to an also-ran OS. Not a step forward so much as a step sideways. Also a significant departure was that none of this stuff was actually developed by IBM, but by Intel, and an unknown snot-nosed kid with a bad haircut, who's mom was on IBM's board at the time. And yet, it was destined to become a huge thing. The technology decision makers in business were certainly no more savvy then than they are now. Why did it take off? "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was what was often said.
So, as it turns out, the singular thing that IBM contributed to the PC was its logo.
Re:"Automate the Third Reich"? (Score:5, Informative)
Sure you may be able to say technically the first home computer that could be called personal wasn't an IBM, but does anyone run 6502 MOSFET chips anymore?
Of course not, any more than anybody runs Intel 8088 chips anymore, uses an ISA expansion bus, Shugart disc interfaces etc. I even believe that modern systems can have more than 640K of RAM...
The 6502 might not have had any official surviving children (ISTR there was a 16-bit variant used in the Apple II GS), but its pretty well documented that it was a major influence [wikipedia.org] on the design of the ARM.
Hell even Apple now is IBM PC compatible.
No, Apple uses chips based on the modern x86-32 and x86-64 architectures. I don't think the fact that these have legacy backwards-compatibility with the 8088 was a major influence on Apple's decision to switch. That has more to do with IBM and Motorola's failure to manufacture a mobile version of the PPC G5, at a time when Apple was doing rather well with non-Intel based machines...
As someone who lived through that time
You must have been very, very drunk, because you don't remember it very well.
Folks seem to forget that before the 5150 NOTHING worked together, [snip] As someone who had a Trash80 and a VIC20
Which is why, pre-PC, serious commercial microcomputer users tended to use one of the many CP/M-based systems rather than VIC20s, to the extent that there were even kludges available to run CP/M on Trash-80s and Apple IIs (the latter requiring a Z80 system on an expansion card). This is what IBM-lovers like to airbrush out of history because the "revolutionary" IBM PC was really just a "me too" CP/M-86 machine (MS-DOS/PC-DOS being, effectively, a clone of CP/M).
Now thanks to the failure of the IBM PS/2 and MicroChannel architecture you can buy...
There, put that right for you.
your printer still plugs in,
Nice to know that IBM invented the Centronics and RS232 interfaces, and that anybody who remembers using those on non-IBM computers is delusional.
you don't need IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots
You seem to think IBM invented the PCI bus. They didn't - the original ISA bus had "IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots" up the wazzoo.
Now if we could only get the same thing in the mobile space, to where laptops had standard motherboards like ATX and mATX
If only people didn't want their mobiles to be slim, and light, and, well, mobile...
Re:PC Invention (Score:4, Informative)
This is correct. The original PC/XT was good, the AT keyboard even better. The chicklet PCjr keyboard was junk.
I can't imagine any college at that time teaching programming on PC-DOS 1.0. Don't believe it.