Open nature of PC allowed for truly free/open source software to exist which can be functional without big corporate lockdown. I can fully assemble it with parts I can buy individually and as long as they are compatible (which is mentioned on the box, no hidden knowledge here) I can expect it to work within the mentioned warranty.
My PC based computers can be booted and fully functional with Debain, Fedora and (put your favorite Linux, BSD distro here mine is openSUSE Tumbleweed). There is no parallel ecosystem which yet, which rivals PC in terms of open specs and fully tinkerable hardware and software.
Macbooks are locked down with Apple and forget about your own hardware.
Android seemed like a competitor, but closed nature of its development and lack commodity hardware around ARM based phones means that FOSS layer exists only in user bases apps. We have custom ROMs which require bootable blobs from vendors and its non-reliable and breaks often.
What do you suppose they would do? Seems to me that once the hardware is out there someone determined enough can find a way, no? I don’t see how this would affect their bottom line negatively either… hell, if they officially supported Linux I’m sure their hardware sales would do even better!
You are right. We are lucky. A company like Digital could have made the PDP-11 into 'the PC' and lock it down from the beginning. IBM could have done the same if they had not been so incompetent. In such a case you would have Intel, IBM and Microsoft being a single organization that would have become to powerful.
We still had plenty of issue with Intel and Microsoft being able to play out their monopoly.
So I think it could have been a lot worse, but it could also have been a lot better.
lol I remember years ago, people complained so much about "Wintel." And while I'm currently in the Linux+AMD camp, Intel and Windows are still far more open than any ARM+Android/iOS/anything world
Microsoft has been a decent enough steward of the x86 PC standard and the qualification test suite that defines it. If they are smart (which isn't necessarily guaranteed) and with enough pressure from industry and anti-competitiveness regulators to not close it off, they would probably be an adequate steward of a ARM PC standard as well.
The market is already full of ARM development boards that are pretty powerful. Just need to scale these up and put some real power on them.
Put something with the power of an M series or a Graviton on these and you have the start of a great ARM PC market.
There's nothing inherently not-open about ARM, or at least it's no less open by nature than x86. The fact that most ARM devices are locked down is a secondary effect from most of them being phones.
RISC-V would be more open than either of these but it still lags on performance. I have a RISC-V board but it's kind of slow. Not terrible but wouldn't make a good PC for anything but basic uses.
> There's nothing inherently not-open about ARM, or at least it's no less open by nature than x86. The fact that most ARM devices are locked down is a secondary effect from most of them being phones.
I'd argue lack of something like ACPI to discover the device tree and memory map is why this impression exists. Besides the ARM CPUs not being socketed.
PC only got where it was thanks to the mistakes that made clones possible.
Everyone else, including other IBM offerings, were all about vertical integration.
It is no coincidence that nowadays with PC desktops being largely left to enthusiastics and gamers, OEMs are all doubling down on vertical integration across laptops and mobile devices, as means to recoup the thin margins that have come to be.
The original IBM PC was proprietary only in its BIOS. It was a mistake IBM regretted very soon and tried to fix with an PS/2 architecture, MCA bus, and even OS/2 operating system.
But Microsoft and the companies that made PC clones did everything to keep this "mistake" alive.
In fact, the openness of the PC platform is a historical accident. Other proprietary personal computer manufacturers (like Apple, Commodore and Atari) also never planned to create an open platform either. The closest thing was the 8-bit MSX platform, which was a Microsoft thing for the Japanese market, and it was very soon outdated.
Other than using COTS parts (incl. the CPU), the BIOS, while proprietary, was in a way the weakest link as far as cloning, since it established a ROM-based standardized hardware interface that isolated the OS from the hardware.
Companies like Compaq, and later Phoenix and AMI, were able to get around the proprietary nature of the BIOS by building clean-room BIOS clones that withstood IBM's legal challenges.
However, given the willingness of Microsoft (apparently with little IBM could do about it) to sell MS-DOS variants to others like Compaq, and later the emergence of MS-DOS clones like DR-DOS, it's not obvious that clones might not still have taken off without the unintentional assist of the standardized BIOS interface.
I think the big change over the past 17 years has been the app stores (and on the less 'personal' computer side businesses will be on support contracts), the from the manufacturers point of view hardware and software is a loss leader to try and funnel users to where they do as much computer related commerce through their middle-man. In some ways it's an evolution of bundling software where that would be another source of income.
In 1990, everyone on my higschool that had access to computers was distributed between Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga, and PCs, with PCs being the minority.
> First, IBM didn’t make the most of its dominance. It did little to make the IBM version of the PC truly unique.
Remember IBM had gone through a very painful antitrust case and was still subject to the consent decree. I’m not sure right now of the terms, but it certainly limited the leverages IBM could apply against third parties profiting from the PC.
There was still an antitrust case in process against IBM in 1981 when the PC was launched, it would only be dropped by the US in 1982. I started in 1990 and the fear of another antitrust case pervaded everything through the ten years I was there, even after the earlier consent decree expired.
> First, IBM didn’t make the most of its dominance. It did little to make the IBM version of the PC truly unique.
They tried, in the form of the previously mentioned PS/2. They just squeezed a little too hard. There was also the PCjr, which was riddled with enough technical flaws at a blistering price point for it to also end up a flop (Charlie Chaplin was also not exactly a great choice to sell to a market already trending younger). IBM might have eventually gotten it right, they just lost the will to keep trying. Their business model depended on landing corporate whales buying high-margin products and services; mere commodities were a plebeian concern beneath them.
Steve Jobs came to my university in 1984 to push the Mac, where he told us that we students could buy one for half price. At the same talk he rattled off all the flaws of the PCjr and said the famous line "IBM should do us a favor and just throw them all in the Hudson."
I'm not sure it was a misfire — I remember those ads as being pretty popular and having big mindshare. But that was certainly just my small perspective of the times.
I remember eyebrows being raised even at the time over the Chaplin ads, but I suppose they're memorable enough even today that they couldn't have been all that off the mark. Certainly wasn't the worst of the missteps around the PCjr (and I'd forgotten they ran the same flavor of ads for the PC AT, which was a fine machine!)
This reads like a case study from "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen.
TL;DR: big incumbents (e.g. IBM) get out-innovated and replaced by scrappy startups even when the incumbent sees it coming and tries to react. The incumbent's business processes, sales metrics (NPII in this story), internal culture and established customer base make it impossible for an innovative product to succeed within the company.
The incumbent produces an innovative gadget. It may even be good, but its Sales Dept earn their quarterly bonus from the existing product line sold to the existing customers. They haven't got time to go chasing small orders of the new gadget from new customers who they don't have a relationship with, and the existing customers don't see the point of the new gadget. So orders for the gadget stagnate.
Across town is the small scrappy start-up making a similar gadget. It lives on those small orders and has a highly motivated sales person who chases those orders full time. So their orders grow, their product improves from the market feedback, and one day the new gadget is actually better than the incumbent's main product. At that point the incumbent goes out of business.
It actually is a case study from the Innovator's Dilemma:
Yet IBM’s success in the first five years of the personal computing industry stands in stark contrast to
the failure of the other leading mainframe and minicomputer makers to catch the disruptive desktop
computing wave. How did IBM do it? It created an autonomous organization in Florida, far away from its
New York state headquarters, that was free to procure components from any source, to sell through its own
channels, and to forge a cost structure appropriate to the technological and competitive requirements
of the personal computing market. The organization was free to succeed along metrics of success that were
relevant to the personal computing market. In fact, some have argued that IBM’s subsequent decision to
link its personal computer division much more closely to its mainstream organization was an important
factor in IBM’s difficulties in maintaining its profitability and market share in the personal computer
industry. It seems to be very difficult to manage the peaceful, unambiguous coexistence of two cost
structures, and two models for how to make money, within a single company.
> The incumbent produces an innovative gadget. It may even be good, but its Sales Dept earn their quarterly bonus from the existing product line sold to the existing customers.
In a rare feat, Apple managed to do just that with the iPhone, which ate the iPod’s lunch. This at a time when the iPod was a core product, directly responsible for their revival and success, that could have been milked for years to come.
IBM didn't create an innovative product though. If you look at the era, there were dozens of machines of a similar style on the market, either z80 or 8080, 8088, even 8086... but they ran CP/M. PC-DOS was effectively a kind of fork / rip-off of DR's CP/M, but clean room and customized for 8086.
IBM created a rather generic machine using off the shelf components, and someone else's operating system.
Innovation factor was almost zero.
The only advantage it had was it had IBM's name on it, and IBM was still a Really Big Deal then. It brought "respectability" to a thing that before was still a weird subculture.
> I don’t think that culturally IBM ever really felt that the PC was a true IBM product
This makes perfect sense. In the early 2010s I worked with what remained of IBM development and was surprised at the dysfunction, complete lack of manufacturing culture and engineering approaches. I couldn't believe that this culture could produce a successful product. Guess what, it actually didn't.
IBM wasn’t that hopeless, at least not so early. It produced some fairly successful and well-regarded products in the ‘80s and ‘90s like the POWER architecture, the AS/400, and updates to its mainframe line.
2010's would have been too late to see those things. Wrt PCs, the PC company sale was complete and IIRC Lenovo was no longer even sharing space with IBM.
No, because it became a locked down ecosystem that is user-hostile and not user-controllable. I realized this when I observed the younger generation, who I thought would be much better than us at computing, who had not a clue how anything worked because they never had the ability, need, or desire to tinker with the underlying systems, with only rare exceptions (roms, etc).
IBM tried to make a more thoroughly "IBM" proprietary PC product first with the PCjr and then especially with the PS/2. Attempted to lock down the hardware a bit more, introduced the Microchannel bus/architecture, etc.
But it was too late, and they didn't have the power they thought they had.
They nerfed the PCjr with a horrid keyboard to keep the office people from buying it. This is a shame, as it had better color graphics, and we had to wait for XGA (or Tandy 1000) to get better color.
>I don’t think that culturally IBM ever really felt that the PC was a true IBM product.
That was true everywhere. I worked at a mini company at the time when the PC came out. People in that company looked at the PC as a cool thing, but not a real computer.
In 10 or so years, the PC killed of almost all mini computer companies. Some even speculated that was the main reason for IBM to create the PC :)
Can anyone remember when IBM made their own clones?
Ambra?
They had very unusual mice but I never saw one in the wild.
The sale to Lenovo went very well, when compared to how most mergers, acquisitions and consolidations went in the period. I can't remember Lenovo from before the acquisition and, again, I can't remember seeing any pre-Thinkpad Lenovo machines.
Thank the fate for PC to exist!
Open nature of PC allowed for truly free/open source software to exist which can be functional without big corporate lockdown. I can fully assemble it with parts I can buy individually and as long as they are compatible (which is mentioned on the box, no hidden knowledge here) I can expect it to work within the mentioned warranty.
My PC based computers can be booted and fully functional with Debain, Fedora and (put your favorite Linux, BSD distro here mine is openSUSE Tumbleweed). There is no parallel ecosystem which yet, which rivals PC in terms of open specs and fully tinkerable hardware and software.
Macbooks are locked down with Apple and forget about your own hardware.
Android seemed like a competitor, but closed nature of its development and lack commodity hardware around ARM based phones means that FOSS layer exists only in user bases apps. We have custom ROMs which require bootable blobs from vendors and its non-reliable and breaks often.
> Macbooks are locked down with Apple and forget about your own hardware.
Not completely. Asahi linux boots on bare metal and runs great on Apple silicon machines prior to the M3.
Mostly because Apple is so rich that they don't care. If they were not swimming in a pool of money this wouldn't happen.
What do you suppose they would do? Seems to me that once the hardware is out there someone determined enough can find a way, no? I don’t see how this would affect their bottom line negatively either… hell, if they officially supported Linux I’m sure their hardware sales would do even better!
You are right. We are lucky. A company like Digital could have made the PDP-11 into 'the PC' and lock it down from the beginning. IBM could have done the same if they had not been so incompetent. In such a case you would have Intel, IBM and Microsoft being a single organization that would have become to powerful.
We still had plenty of issue with Intel and Microsoft being able to play out their monopoly.
So I think it could have been a lot worse, but it could also have been a lot better.
Just wait for the PC ARM to take off as the anti-x86 keeps cheerleading, how open do you think it will remain?
lol I remember years ago, people complained so much about "Wintel." And while I'm currently in the Linux+AMD camp, Intel and Windows are still far more open than any ARM+Android/iOS/anything world
Microsoft has been a decent enough steward of the x86 PC standard and the qualification test suite that defines it. If they are smart (which isn't necessarily guaranteed) and with enough pressure from industry and anti-competitiveness regulators to not close it off, they would probably be an adequate steward of a ARM PC standard as well.
> Just wait for the PC ARM to take off
I'm waiting. A PC (ATX) with ARM or RISC-V or Mx or Power would be very nice.
Haven't seen any though. Raspberry is a joke from a PC extendability point of view.
The market is already full of ARM development boards that are pretty powerful. Just need to scale these up and put some real power on them.
Put something with the power of an M series or a Graviton on these and you have the start of a great ARM PC market.
There's nothing inherently not-open about ARM, or at least it's no less open by nature than x86. The fact that most ARM devices are locked down is a secondary effect from most of them being phones.
RISC-V would be more open than either of these but it still lags on performance. I have a RISC-V board but it's kind of slow. Not terrible but wouldn't make a good PC for anything but basic uses.
> There's nothing inherently not-open about ARM,
UEFI ?
> There's nothing inherently not-open about ARM, or at least it's no less open by nature than x86. The fact that most ARM devices are locked down is a secondary effect from most of them being phones.
I'd argue lack of something like ACPI to discover the device tree and memory map is why this impression exists. Besides the ARM CPUs not being socketed.
PC only got where it was thanks to the mistakes that made clones possible.
Everyone else, including other IBM offerings, were all about vertical integration.
It is no coincidence that nowadays with PC desktops being largely left to enthusiastics and gamers, OEMs are all doubling down on vertical integration across laptops and mobile devices, as means to recoup the thin margins that have come to be.
The original IBM PC was proprietary only in its BIOS. It was a mistake IBM regretted very soon and tried to fix with an PS/2 architecture, MCA bus, and even OS/2 operating system.
But Microsoft and the companies that made PC clones did everything to keep this "mistake" alive.
In fact, the openness of the PC platform is a historical accident. Other proprietary personal computer manufacturers (like Apple, Commodore and Atari) also never planned to create an open platform either. The closest thing was the 8-bit MSX platform, which was a Microsoft thing for the Japanese market, and it was very soon outdated.
Other than using COTS parts (incl. the CPU), the BIOS, while proprietary, was in a way the weakest link as far as cloning, since it established a ROM-based standardized hardware interface that isolated the OS from the hardware.
Companies like Compaq, and later Phoenix and AMI, were able to get around the proprietary nature of the BIOS by building clean-room BIOS clones that withstood IBM's legal challenges.
However, given the willingness of Microsoft (apparently with little IBM could do about it) to sell MS-DOS variants to others like Compaq, and later the emergence of MS-DOS clones like DR-DOS, it's not obvious that clones might not still have taken off without the unintentional assist of the standardized BIOS interface.
I think the big change over the past 17 years has been the app stores (and on the less 'personal' computer side businesses will be on support contracts), the from the manufacturers point of view hardware and software is a loss leader to try and funnel users to where they do as much computer related commerce through their middle-man. In some ways it's an evolution of bundling software where that would be another source of income.
That is certainly part of it.
> I think the big change over the past 17 years has been the app stores
And also cloud applications, which are useless without the harder-to-clone data center part.
I do not think that is true. Lets remember that still in 1990 IBM alone was about 50% of the whole market. Even without clones IBM PC would have won.
Had IBM made clones impossible they could likely have captured far more of the market.
It certainly wasn't IBM ability to produce PC that prevented them selling more.
Likely eventually they would have licensed the architecture to AT&T and the like.
Vertical integration could have worked, we are just lucky it didn't.
In what bubble?
In 1990, everyone on my higschool that had access to computers was distributed between Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga, and PCs, with PCs being the minority.
> First, IBM didn’t make the most of its dominance. It did little to make the IBM version of the PC truly unique.
Remember IBM had gone through a very painful antitrust case and was still subject to the consent decree. I’m not sure right now of the terms, but it certainly limited the leverages IBM could apply against third parties profiting from the PC.
There was still an antitrust case in process against IBM in 1981 when the PC was launched, it would only be dropped by the US in 1982. I started in 1990 and the fear of another antitrust case pervaded everything through the ten years I was there, even after the earlier consent decree expired.
Having lived through all this, I highly recommend "The Crazy Ones" blog from Gareth Edwards. https://every.to/the-crazy-ones
The blog on Don Estridge covers IBM's place in PC history in fascinating and extensive detail.
Mr. Edwards also reminded me what a debt Linux users owe to Rod Canion for making the gang of 9 and open hardware a reality.
I find it sad that IBM didn’t view ThinkPad as a core business and chose to sell it instead. They made some of the best laptops at the time.
> First, IBM didn’t make the most of its dominance. It did little to make the IBM version of the PC truly unique.
They tried, in the form of the previously mentioned PS/2. They just squeezed a little too hard. There was also the PCjr, which was riddled with enough technical flaws at a blistering price point for it to also end up a flop (Charlie Chaplin was also not exactly a great choice to sell to a market already trending younger). IBM might have eventually gotten it right, they just lost the will to keep trying. Their business model depended on landing corporate whales buying high-margin products and services; mere commodities were a plebeian concern beneath them.
Steve Jobs came to my university in 1984 to push the Mac, where he told us that we students could buy one for half price. At the same talk he rattled off all the flaws of the PCjr and said the famous line "IBM should do us a favor and just throw them all in the Hudson."
I'm glad we have a word now for Charlie Chaplin misfire: Cringe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LR1Xvvch18
I'm not sure it was a misfire — I remember those ads as being pretty popular and having big mindshare. But that was certainly just my small perspective of the times.
I remember eyebrows being raised even at the time over the Chaplin ads, but I suppose they're memorable enough even today that they couldn't have been all that off the mark. Certainly wasn't the worst of the missteps around the PCjr (and I'd forgotten they ran the same flavor of ads for the PC AT, which was a fine machine!)
This reads like a case study from "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen.
TL;DR: big incumbents (e.g. IBM) get out-innovated and replaced by scrappy startups even when the incumbent sees it coming and tries to react. The incumbent's business processes, sales metrics (NPII in this story), internal culture and established customer base make it impossible for an innovative product to succeed within the company.
The incumbent produces an innovative gadget. It may even be good, but its Sales Dept earn their quarterly bonus from the existing product line sold to the existing customers. They haven't got time to go chasing small orders of the new gadget from new customers who they don't have a relationship with, and the existing customers don't see the point of the new gadget. So orders for the gadget stagnate.
Across town is the small scrappy start-up making a similar gadget. It lives on those small orders and has a highly motivated sales person who chases those orders full time. So their orders grow, their product improves from the market feedback, and one day the new gadget is actually better than the incumbent's main product. At that point the incumbent goes out of business.
It actually is a case study from the Innovator's Dilemma:
> The incumbent produces an innovative gadget. It may even be good, but its Sales Dept earn their quarterly bonus from the existing product line sold to the existing customers.
In a rare feat, Apple managed to do just that with the iPhone, which ate the iPod’s lunch. This at a time when the iPod was a core product, directly responsible for their revival and success, that could have been milked for years to come.
IBM didn't create an innovative product though. If you look at the era, there were dozens of machines of a similar style on the market, either z80 or 8080, 8088, even 8086... but they ran CP/M. PC-DOS was effectively a kind of fork / rip-off of DR's CP/M, but clean room and customized for 8086.
IBM created a rather generic machine using off the shelf components, and someone else's operating system.
Innovation factor was almost zero.
The only advantage it had was it had IBM's name on it, and IBM was still a Really Big Deal then. It brought "respectability" to a thing that before was still a weird subculture.
> I don’t think that culturally IBM ever really felt that the PC was a true IBM product
This makes perfect sense. In the early 2010s I worked with what remained of IBM development and was surprised at the dysfunction, complete lack of manufacturing culture and engineering approaches. I couldn't believe that this culture could produce a successful product. Guess what, it actually didn't.
IBM wasn’t that hopeless, at least not so early. It produced some fairly successful and well-regarded products in the ‘80s and ‘90s like the POWER architecture, the AS/400, and updates to its mainframe line.
2010's would have been too late to see those things. Wrt PCs, the PC company sale was complete and IIRC Lenovo was no longer even sharing space with IBM.
The real "Personal Computer" is of course the smartphone.
No, because it became a locked down ecosystem that is user-hostile and not user-controllable. I realized this when I observed the younger generation, who I thought would be much better than us at computing, who had not a clue how anything worked because they never had the ability, need, or desire to tinker with the underlying systems, with only rare exceptions (roms, etc).
You are right, in a way. But losing your smartphone is like losing all your personal information. In that sense it is a personal computer.
> IBM brought the quality of it’s support and it’s endorsement as a personal computer that was worthy of ‘serious’ businesses.
It's only "it's" if it is "it is."
If it is not "it is," it's "its."
-----
Or to be clear (lol),
1) The possessive of "it" is "its."
2) "It's" is a contraction of "it is."
> 2) "It's" is a contraction of "it is."
... or "it has".
--
EDIT: I find it much easier to remember that "its" is (only) the possesive pronoun.
IBM tried to make a more thoroughly "IBM" proprietary PC product first with the PCjr and then especially with the PS/2. Attempted to lock down the hardware a bit more, introduced the Microchannel bus/architecture, etc.
But it was too late, and they didn't have the power they thought they had.
They nerfed the PCjr with a horrid keyboard to keep the office people from buying it. This is a shame, as it had better color graphics, and we had to wait for XGA (or Tandy 1000) to get better color.
>I don’t think that culturally IBM ever really felt that the PC was a true IBM product.
That was true everywhere. I worked at a mini company at the time when the PC came out. People in that company looked at the PC as a cool thing, but not a real computer.
In 10 or so years, the PC killed of almost all mini computer companies. Some even speculated that was the main reason for IBM to create the PC :)
They were also clever being on the first line supporting Linux back in the 2000's.
Nowadays not only they own one of the few UNIX proper left standing, they also own everything Red-Hat contributes for.
Can anyone remember when IBM made their own clones?
Ambra?
They had very unusual mice but I never saw one in the wild.
The sale to Lenovo went very well, when compared to how most mergers, acquisitions and consolidations went in the period. I can't remember Lenovo from before the acquisition and, again, I can't remember seeing any pre-Thinkpad Lenovo machines.