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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

#61

Post by neilv »

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]

> The fact that one of the main characters is a "cool" girl at a time where all the characters were a bunch of nerdy guys

From what I recall seeing as a kid, and when working in my teens, that wasn't too unlikely.

There were a lot of women in computing, of various pre-Yahoo-IPO eras.

I think the relative numbers diminished dramatically with the dotcom gold rush, and the newer bro cultures, and gatekeeping.

Only in recent years have we started seeing more women in "tech" again.

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

#62

Post by surfingdino »

forinti wrote: post #43
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.

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…

It was an open platform. In those days, you were getting a set of printed manuals including schematics of the machine when you bought one. It created an ecosystem of clones and expansion hardware. PC-DOS/MS-DOS provided an easy path to port CP-M software.

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

#63

Post by stevenwoo »

nedrylandJP wrote: post #5

There is a "high tech middle school" with his namesake in Boca Raton, FL, next to the former 1960s IBM R&D complex. https://www.palmbeachschools.org/DonEstridgeMiddle

Reading Boca Raton reminded me, they used the names of cities close to the offices for the internal names for products. I co-oped at IBM in Austin in the late 1980s and we tested the new models of PC Jr/Portable/PS2/peripherals and the internal codenames were stuff like Boca Raton and Cedar Key (which none of us got until our boss told us) but I can no longer remember which was which anymore.

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

#64

Post by pjmorris »

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]

I'll add Judy Estrin to the list of cool girls from the time, in addition to the non-famous ones I worked with. Her little company stomped our big company at making X terminals back in the 80's. We were probably 70:30 M/F among our ~two dozen new grads.

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

#65

Post by calmworm »

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…

Completely inaccurate analogy using IASIP and Philly. lol.

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

#67

Post by nabla9 »

garius wrote: post #42
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.

keyboard wasn't great either, to begin with!

Model M keyboards are ridiculously good. They are consistent for every key, have great tactile feedback and are extremely durable.

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

#68

Post by KerrAvon »

This part is factually incorrect:

> The easiest way to set that standard wasn’t just to sell machines; it was to let other companies sell parts, software, and even whole computers that would be compatible with your machine. Unlike all of its major rivals—including the Apple II—the IBM PC was built with an open architecture.

The Apple II was effectively as open as the PC. And IBM didn't want clones any more than Apple did. Both the Apple II and the PC were eventually legally cloned, and neither company could do anything about it.

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

#69

Post by ordu »

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".

Bureaucracy can be like that. Big bosses who might be really interested in increased profits rely on their subordinates to see the market, but subordinates are risk averse and don't want to change anything. Add corporate politics, people fighting not for innovations or for a market share but for promotions, and you'll get the picture.

It seems to be that they besides all that they were ideological, believed that size does matter and scorned on those who made computers smaller than theirs. Ideology means that people would have troubles to see anything that contradicts their ideology. Peer pressure, social desirability and all these things set up individual biases.

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