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Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC

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Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC

#101

Post by illys »

tromp wrote: post #3

It's rare that a tech story brings me to tears, but I couldn't help feel one swelling up when reading the final paragraphs. > Eventually, it was Wilkie who made the first move. Overwhelmed with emotion, his eyes red and swollen with grief, he stepped forward and detached the red rosette from the lapel of his suit jacket. It was the same one Don had given him years before. Leaning down, he gently placed the rosette on…

I love the story... But don't forget this story is the proper selection of events with textual glue and interpretation to make it feel like a novel.

Some statements belong more to the glue than to History, and they should remind us this is a real-life-based * novel *. I especially noted this one: "nobody at IBM had any real experience with [microcomputers]".

IBM senior management was certainly reluctant, but "nobody"... They even had microcomputer products that hit the market:

- IBM 5100 1975, first IBM personal computer

- IBM 5110 1978, 5100 updated for a larger market target

- IBM System/23, under parallel development with the IBM PC and released 1 month before in July 1981: many of the IBM PC features are shared with or taken from it (8-bit Intel processor family 8080 vs. 8088, very same expansion connector, reuse of the electronic expansion cards such as serial, exact same keyboard - just in a different box and with different function keycaps...)

Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC

#102

Post by vmfunction »

gregw2 wrote: post #100
tracker1 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way. The end of the story is just sad. I wish that more companies could break their own structures to offer rewards, bonuses and more freedom to teams like this. The kinds of people that thrive with these kinds of opportunities tend not to do as well with general corporate culture. So many times a relatively small upstart team with enough freedom will accomplish greatness, only for corporate culture t…

Over a decade ago, I had the chance to interact with at a startup with a Microsoft senior person who joined the firm as CTO. One piece of advice he gave stuck out: "Heroism doesn't scale" This wisdom of it was instructive (and you can see it in Estridge's early struggles with success), but so too was the sense that perhaps this "wisdom" was part of what underlay Microsoft's malaise of the late 2000s against Apple and…

"Heroism doesn't scale"

You can pretty much replace Heroism with Leadership or whatever.

Question is do we really need it to scale?

Corporatism thrived off the back of the industrial revolution. It is not bad, it just has taken us as far as it can go.

Something more decentralised and organic should take place instead of corporatism for large scale human development and space exploration.

Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC

#103

Post by aspenmayer »

This is the first time I've heard someone refer to DEC as "Digital." Is that an Australian quirk? Not that it's wrong, as it is part of the name and could likely be a regional expression and/or historically accurate, and in any case it's before my time in the industry.

> but was yet to announce he was gay (took another decade)

I don't know why this detail was included; not that it's anything to be ashamed of. It just doesn't seem relevant at all to the other points you have raised, and seems a bit insensitive or judgemental imo.

Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC

#104

Post by p_l »

akira2501 wrote: post #86
phkahler wrote: post #11

>> His divisional heads always had the same answer. Microcomputers—home computing—were a fad. They were low-cost and low-profit. Let others scrabble around in the metaphorical dirt of home computing. The real money was in the markets that IBM’s divisions already dominated—selling vast mainframes and minicomputer systems to large businesses. Cary was even told to buy Atari, which by then had established itself as Amer…

> Not sure how IBM folks could not see this opportunity just because it was smaller scale than "what they did". I encourage everyone to get a copy of the Hercules emulator and a copy of the "Turn Key 5" MVS distribution and spend a little time using it. The mainframe idea of "computing" and "running jobs" is so comprehensively different it's really hard to map any previous consumer computing experience into it. It's…

IBM on S/360 also did a lot of early interactive computing, not just batch processing.

What was common though then and now was renting computers.

Essentially, cloud computing.

Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC

#105

Post by p_l »

macintux wrote: post #57
garius wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I'll be covering OS/2 when I look at operating systems in this period. The level of foot-shooting by IBM on that one was ridiculous.

Could IBM have succeeded given Microsoft’s betrayal? Or did Microsoft just give up on IBM ever delivering something?

Arguably they could have avoided Microsoft "betrayal" as well. Ultimately, Windows 3.0 was a skunkworks project of single engineer against the corporate decisions of Microsoft, and only when it was quite closer to complete did it start getting management buy-in.

Pretty sure for a long time it was "cloaked" as stop-gap solution, a continuation of the lesser-known "windows runtime embedded in application" option that some software shipped with.

Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC

#106

Post by p_l »

aspenmayer wrote: post #103

This is the first time I've heard someone refer to DEC as "Digital." Is that an Australian quirk? Not that it's wrong, as it is part of the name and could likely be a regional expression and/or historically accurate, and in any case it's before my time in the industry. > but was yet to announce he was gay (took another decade) I don't know why this detail was included; not that it's anything to be ashamed of. It just…

It's a Digital thing.

IIRC, the company itself promoted the use of "Digital" rather than "DEC", with the latter being accident of funding availability when it was founded.

Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC

#107

Post by jhbadger »

mrguyorama wrote: post #50
LaundroMat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that?

It's extremely contrived and deus-ex-machina all the way through. The "history" the show goes over is crammed into it's Drama first story. The history is there for nostalgia bait, not to celebrate the history or educate. That's why pretty much everything interesting that happened in computing was mangled into coming from the same like 5 people. And the characters are all just narcissistic assholes who are self destru…

I was annoyed by the C64's that were shown as having "C:>" prompts as if they were MS-DOS machines. I think I get where that was coming from -- people who were too young to remember the period were designing the sets and vaguely remembered that "old-timey" computers had "C:>" prompts and given that C64's are old computers, assumed they did too.

Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC

#108

Post by spacechild1 »

aspenmayer wrote: post #103

This is the first time I've heard someone refer to DEC as "Digital." Is that an Australian quirk? Not that it's wrong, as it is part of the name and could likely be a regional expression and/or historically accurate, and in any case it's before my time in the industry. > but was yet to announce he was gay (took another decade) I don't know why this detail was included; not that it's anything to be ashamed of. It just…

Ha! I had no idea what parent meant with 'Digital', thanks for clearing things up :)

Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC

#109

Post by contingencies »

aspenmayer wrote: post #103

This is the first time I've heard someone refer to DEC as "Digital." Is that an Australian quirk? Not that it's wrong, as it is part of the name and could likely be a regional expression and/or historically accurate, and in any case it's before my time in the industry. > but was yet to announce he was gay (took another decade) I don't know why this detail was included; not that it's anything to be ashamed of. It just…

PC shutdowns have no place on HN, we deal in facts. It was included because I personally felt that it was an interesting historic tidbit... especially since he'd flipped from suit to flip-flops and commercial unix to Linux, but still kept this secret. No doubt in those days executives with career plans probably had to keep such things unknown. Can't comment on Digital analogues.

Re. classic PC shutdown emotive, character mud-slinging focused response below, check again: I did not state an opinion, I did exactly the opposite. Unsure what you think you are "calling me out" on - all I expressed was a (very public) fact[0] (furthermore, about which discussion has been intentionally invited), and when questioned, expressed the purpose for doing so was an interest in sharing that fact for others, since it is historically notable with respect to distinction from the current era. If my interest in sharing is now a matter subject to your offense, feel free to be offended, but don't post about it.

[0] https://www.linux-magazine.com/content/view/full/55727

Re: Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC

#110

Post by CamperBob2 »

mhewett wrote: post #93
garius wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I'll be covering OS/2 when I look at operating systems in this period. The level of foot-shooting by IBM on that one was ridiculous.

I was working at IBM in Boca Raton in 1990-91 when OS/2 was being developed. Wandering the hallways one afternoon, I passed by the OS/2 team where I overheard one engineer explaining to another engineer, "See, when you drag a file to the trash can, it should be a Move operation, not a Copy." I thought, OMG, this project is hosed. This was just a few months before it was supposed to be released. The first release of O…

Wandering the hallways one afternoon, I passed by the OS/2 team where I overheard one engineer explaining to another engineer, "See, when you drag a file to the trash can, it should be a Move operation, not a Copy."

But you didn't hear the other engineer respond, "No, no, you don't understand. This is an advanced prototype using functional programming. Moving the document to the trash would have side effects. Creating a copy and placing that in the trash can, however..."

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