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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

#111

Post by aspenmayer »

contingencies wrote: post #109
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, chara…

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

#112

Post by com2kid »

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…

Microsoft has plenty of similar stories, perhaps most famously the story of how Xbox was developed.

I was lucky to be at MSFT during what might have been the last gasps of when a single person could have a huge impact, and it was something I saw from time to time, but it by the 00s and surely the 2010s, it was in huge decline vs the stories that were told about the 1990s.

Edit: Someone posted below about how Windows 3.0 was also a misfit project.

There is also F#, which has had a huge impact on C#.

The entire async framework in .NET was originally developed by a small team headed up by one brilliant engineer.

Silverlight started as a project by a small team in Microsoft Research to see if they could shrink .NET's runtime down to be small enough to complete with Flash.

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

#113

Post by II2II »

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…

>> 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.

Those views seemed to be relatively common. Just look at those home computer upstarts, many of which were scrambling to make business machines. Apple's follow ups to the Apple II were the Apple III and Lisa, both intended for business. Commodore seemed to have business computers on their plate most of the time. Tandy also pursued the business market. TI was a bit of an outlier in that they were into minicomputers before personal computers, and quickly jumped ship when they turned out to be low profit. Maybe it was different in Europe, but certainly not in North America.

I'm not entirely sure they were wrong either. A lot of companies rose then fell in the home computer market. IBM themselves haven't pursued the home market in decades at this point. Many, if not most, segments consolidated to the point that there was just one company with any meaningful market share. It could even be argued that the real money these days isn't in the hardware or software for the home market, but in the services they enable access to.

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

#114

Post by wslh »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #81
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…

Although I sometimes wonder how much survivor bias there is in these stories. How many misfit teams failed? Which is not to defend corporate hyper-control at all. But I suspect that knowing how often skunkworks projects work, and how success can be affected by different personalities and corporate contexts, might be useful information.

It is more complex than that. In some fields there was a culture of labs and special projects. IBM, Bell Labs, Xerox, and many other companies followed that route and there were corporations with a lot of bureaucracy.

Good thread in /r/AskHistorians: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1kxnd1/what_...

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

#115

Post by pinebox »

doubloon wrote: post #88
forinti wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did some historical research to understand why the PC caught on (it made no sense to my 1980s teenage mind). A PC with 80 columns card, 64KB of RAM and a floppy drive cost about the same as an Apple II Plus with the same specs (US$2,700). A BBC Micro would set you back about US$1,500 (£900). It didn't offer slots, but did have 80 columns standard. It also had a lot of ports. You couldn't even argue that the 8088 wa…

its the soft power of the IBM name. it's not possible to describe it now or for people nowdays to understand what that name meant. you went to a big company they ran IBM. you want to get the same kind of computer 'that they use at work'. and what they have at work is IBM. like this concept just makes no sense whatsoever in todays culture. computers used to be secret. they were tools of the priesthood. you wanted to j…

It was the 80's equivalent of green text messages vs. blue text messages.

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

#116

Post by samatman »

aspenmayer wrote: post #111
contingencies wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, chara…

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

#118

Post by mixmastamyk »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #2

I was living in Texas at the time of Flight 191. I was no fan of the IBM PC but it was still gut-wrenching to hear that the father of the machine had been killed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines_Flight_191 This was the crash that brought the term "microburst" into the national consciousness.

Wow, the wiki page is nearly as good a read as the professionally written article. I broke the IBM-related text under the Passengers section out to its own paragraph, as it changes from statistics to specifics. Hopefully will remain that way.

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

#119

Post by mixmastamyk »

nabla9 wrote: post #30

Classic example of Worse is Better. All competing architectures were better than IBM PC architecture, PC BIOS was bad, chosen processor instruction set was the worst, MS-DOS operating system was bad. Only the keyboard was good. What made it winner was open architecture, 80-column screen and IBM name.

Besides their name, they chose their market correctly, i.e. where the money/momentum was—small business. Third-party support was great.

Most people in the early 80s had no idea what to do with a computer at home, that's why they mostly were bought by enthusiasts, tinkerers, and gamers. I remember one of the main uses listed on the boxes was "keeping track of recipes." Haha, imagine spending thousands of dollars for a giant clunky thing to organize recipes when a box of index cards would do.

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

#120

Post by rvense »

zabzonk wrote: post #29

i believe that estridge was being head-hunted at apple as ceo before they eventually hired scully. sad thing is that if they had hired him, he might even be alive today, but he preferred to stay at big blue.

I'd never heard of this, but it's in the article, too. I think the tech world would have looked very different if Estridge had taken over instead of Sculley.
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