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'."
lulz research (Score:5, Interesting)
The truth about lulz : Edwin Black, an author holed up in his basement, spending years and years researching the details for a book, reading thousands of documents and talking with hundreds of people, will achieve far more lulz, in the long run, than hacking a website.
Black's book came out circa 2001. That is 10 years ago, and people still talk about it. And we still wait for IBM to open their archives.
Not even close (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Automate the Third Reich"? (Score:5, Interesting)
A little bit.
I'm not exactly IBM's biggest fan (having to hammer on 370-series mainframes made me quite the IBM-hater for awhile), but to say that IBM automated the Nazis would be akin to saying that {insert item here} helped to {insert what that item does} the Nazis.
I mean, I'm pretty sure that WWII Germany had light bulbs, motion pictures, aircraft, NCR calculators (the old mechanical kind), and lots of other things pioneered by American individuals and companies. I'm also willing to bet that many of them were used directly in facilitating the Holocaust as well.
Hell, Henry Ford was an open admirer of Hitler's policies before (and even in the pre-US stages of) WWII, and an unabashed anti-semite... does that make the Ford Mustang a Nazimobile?
But yeah, basically, TFA is a Godwin.
Re:Not even close (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember a computer trade journal article that came out about the same time the IBM PC was released, where they went through the parts list of the items that went into the original IBM PC. After going through all of the components including the case, the only thing they could identify that was original components that was actually designed by IBM engineers was the sticker label that went on the outside of the case which said "IBM".
That wasn't entirely fair as there were some IBM engineers who had to piece the components together and sort of did help design the motherboard, but otherwise not a single major component inside of that computer was even made by IBM. Even that process of designing the PC motherboard was going way outside of the normal IBM development cycle process and only when a completed motherboard was presented to IBM management that anything resembling a formal project to make the IBM PC a reality was initiated.
What the letters "IBM" did do to the personal computer industry, however, was to legitimize the industry so far as to give conservative business executives an excuse to buy the equipment. Before they weren't about to buy a beige computer from a bunch of hippies in California or a video game console that also happened to do some computing on the side. Before IBM, the personal computer industry was mainly hackers and hobbyists. Afterward, the personal computer went mainstream into homes and medium-sized businesses.
Re:"Automate the Third Reich"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh... but IBM actually did do a lot of contracting for the Nazis.
They weren't just Nazi sympathizers, they didn't just make general-purpose tools and end up having the Nazis use them, they worked with them extensively in a strategic alliance. They talked to them about what they wanted to get done, they helped them do it efficiently, and they put effort into hiding their role.
In particular, they were instrumental in accomplishing the identification of members of targeted ethnic groups, while being fully aware of the Nazi party's intent to persecute them. They provided the information infrastructure necessary to round up all of the jews and gypsies, knowing at the very least that they were to be rounded up.
The IBM 5100 was introduced in 1975 (Score:4, Interesting)
It has the all the main personal computing features we associate with pre-Macintosh/Lisa systems, like a keyboard, CRT, local storage and user programmability. It probably predates the systems you sold by a year or two.
http://oldcomputers.net/ibm5100.html [oldcomputers.net]
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No, they didn't (was Re:Yes, they did) (Score:5, Interesting)
"Just"? You make that sound trivial, when it certainly was not.
Having been there, I can attest to the fact that IBM's PC did indeed legitimize the personal computer for not only businesses, but later for home users who, having used IBM PCs at work, wanted a familiar computer at home as well.
Back then, the mantra in business was "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", and that "magical pixie dust" settled onto the IBM PC as well... and later, with the advent of Compaq, and its "clean room" reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS, opened the door for all of the IBM PC compatible clones that came later, with BIOS' made by AMI, Phoenix and Award, and together they not only legitimized the PC market for business, but standardized it and the home personal computer market as well, while driving down prices as third-party manufacturers created computers based around them.
Hell, I was running a home LAN with IBM XT and AT clones, some booting from diskette [1], with an AT clone server running NetWare v2.0a [wikipedia.org] (with a Seagate ST-4096 80MB MFM HD [2]), using ARCNET [wikipedia.org][3], back in 1988. Being able to centralized my programs, data, and share a printer was a HUGE thing for me, and for my customers as well.
Later, I upgraded my server to an 80386 clone, running NetWare v3, but still kept the 80 MB HD, and it was rock-solid, and the most reliable server I've ever had at home.
Now, you could say that it was all crude, and certainly it was, by today's standards... but I installed hundreds of LANs for small/medium-sized businesses back then, and the benefit they all gained was very real.
NONE of the latter would have been possible without IBM's PC: It not only standardized the hardware and bus, but standardized the client OS as well, which resulted in an explosion of development of not only business applications, but games, and software in general as well.
So, yeah, IBM didn't invent the "PC", and there's more than a little historical revisionism going on... but, to dismiss their effect on personal computing as "just" making it mainstream for business does them disservice as well.
Regards,
dj
[1] Hard drives were very expensive back then, so it was cheaper to use one large, expensive HD in a file server, and boot the workstations from diskette... and keep a box of backup boot diskettes on hand, just in case *grin*
[2] Seagate's ST-4096 was a state-of-the-art HD then: With 28ms average access speeds, capable of running at 1 to 1 interleave, it was blisteringly fast, and very reliable. Not to mention the fact that 80MB was "Huge tracts of storage"... when I installed one a customer, long before I could afford one myself, I asked him "So, what are you going to do with so much storage?" His answer? "Anything I want" *grin*.
[3] We used ARCNET for our customers, because the NICs were FAR less expensive than Ethernet NICs. We used SMC's NICs, until Thomas-Conrad came along, and beat them not only in price, but performance - T-C's ARCNET NICs used less upper memory in enhanced mode (4K vs. 16K or 32K as I recall), and their drivers were a LOT more efficient/faster.. later, they sold a "Universal Turbo" ARCNET NIC driver that worked with any ARCNET NIC, but made their NICs a LOT faster, and that was HUGE, too, from a management perspective: We only had to use one driver, regardless of NIC manufacturer.
Back in the pre-Ethernet switch days, ARCNET also performed a lot better under load than Ethernet with the same node count per network segment, despite "only" running at 2.5Mbps vs. Ethernet's theoretical 10Mbps...and it scaled deterministically as well. In addition, ARCNET over RG-62/U coax could be run 3000 feet, active port to active port, which helped minimize the number of active hubs needed, and offered FAR more flexibility in the real world.
[4] This footnote has no referral - but I suppose that this is where I should say "You damn kids get off my lawn!" *grin*
Nostalgically,
dj
Re:"Automate the Third Reich"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly! It was a now-classic consulting scenario: the business (e.g, Nazi Germany) buys a big shiny piece of hardware, and with it they get some IBM consultants to customize it. The business comes up with its business rules, e.g, every generation the Jewishness halves if a Jew marries a non-Jew, anyone who is at least 1/64th Jewish is considered a Jew, and here's some census data that says who has claimed to be a Jew up until the current moment who has married whom (gotta ferret out those crypto-Jews, sneaky though they are), and we want names and addresses out of it. Then the consultants go hmm okay that'll be $lots and implement the system.
It would have absolutely impossible for IBM's consultant programmers to have worked on this project without realizing that Hitler would be using this information to round up citizens based on their ethnicity. I can totally accept that the consultants didn't realize that the Jews would be killed (it's hard to believe that people are going to die as a result of your work, honestly), but there was no way for them to have done this without realizing that, you know, the names and addresses are popping out of our tabulating machine and going straight to the Gestapo who all run out waving truncheons.