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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

#51

Post by tombert »

deater wrote: post #40
nabla9 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple II hand proprietary design. You could not clone it legally. Just like posting source code does not make the code open, publishing schematics does not make the design open.

no, you could very easily clone the Apple II easily and it was done many, many times it's true that eventually Apple started suing people, but until Apple vs Franklin it was unclear if you could even copyright a BIOS. And once that was determined, people had to clean-room reverse engineer the BIOS but it was possible to make clones (see the Laser 128 and many many others) this is just as open as the IBM PC was. You c…

Even more, Apple tried to block the Laser 128 and failed, since VTech didn't actually do anything illegal; they reverse engineered the Apple APIs and licensed BASIC directly from Microsoft.

They were actually pretty cool computers; half the price of the name brand Apple while being mostly fully compatible with all the software. I've only played with one once, but I thought it was pretty cool. Sad that VTech only makes crappy kids toys now.

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

#53

Post by folsom »

phone8675309 wrote: post #23
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" They thought it was a fad - that centralized systems (coincidentally, the machines they made) would be the computing platform that people would pay-per-minute/pay-per-hour/pay-per-month to access remotely. They wanted to be an information utility - a supplier to all - instead of selling a small, low margin b…

So you are saying that they were too far ahead of their time.

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

#54

Post by bee_rider »

dkarl wrote: post #27
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…

None of those division heads were trying to honestly assess the microcomputer market. They were trying to stay in harmony with opinion at their level and higher in IBM. That's what you get at that level in a company that big. Anyone who is two or more levels from the top of the org chart and also two or more levels from the bottom lives in a reality that consists entirely of the attitudes and opinions of other people…

A ridiculous and totally unrealistic example, and also the funniest description of office social politics I think I’ve ever seen.

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

#55

Post by AlbertCory »

trollerator23 wrote: post #52
assimpleaspossi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely horrible show and I advise people to not waste their time.

[flagged]

No, you're wrong. I was there. It was mostly guys, but there were plenty of women as well. Radia Perlman, to name just one famous one. I recall another from Lawrence Livermore whom I met at an IETF. I went to grad school with several of them.

There certainly is a lot of woke revisionist BS around. No doubt about that.

Edit: in my current book "This New Internet Thing" one of the characters, Cassie, wants to adopt a child as a single woman. I got advice on that process by Heidi Buelow (RIP), who was last at Oracle but worked on the Xerox Star, and adopted two children of her own (Cassie is not modeled on Heidi, except for that). Heidi unfortunately died while I was writing it, and I can't find any online obituary on her.

Since we're talking about "back in the day" naturally some of those people have crossed the Great Divide. You can find a few women in here as well:

https://decconnection.org/memorials.htm

Not a lot, of course. But not none.

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

#56

Post by AlbertCory »

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…

Wrong. That's like saying the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin novels are "contrived." Hello, it's fiction. It isn't there to educate, except insofar as the situations the characters find themselves in teach you something about what it was like back then.

Season 2, though, I couldn't watch.

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

#57

Post by macintux »

garius wrote: post #47
tracker1 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They hamstrung and killed OS/2 similarly.

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?

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

#59

Post by [deleted] »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #24
LaundroMat wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that?

The acting is horrible. The writing is terrible. The story veers off into areas unrelated. There is a moment of a thoroughly unrelated homosexual encounter. (What was the point of that?!) Moments I know that are so really stretched too far to be believable. And on and on. So bad I couldn't finish the series.

[deleted]

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

#60

Post by joezydeco »

deater wrote: post #40
nabla9 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple II hand proprietary design. You could not clone it legally. Just like posting source code does not make the code open, publishing schematics does not make the design open.

no, you could very easily clone the Apple II easily and it was done many, many times it's true that eventually Apple started suing people, but until Apple vs Franklin it was unclear if you could even copyright a BIOS. And once that was determined, people had to clean-room reverse engineer the BIOS but it was possible to make clones (see the Laser 128 and many many others) this is just as open as the IBM PC was. You c…

The key was that by publishing the BIOS source in the open, it was hard to prove that you weren't exposed to the source code when you wrote your own BIOS.

The clean-room approach was a neat hack that solved the problem, but it was hard to find people that had never seen the IBM source and could prove it.

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-comp...

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