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my favorite screwdriver shop (PC parts, cases, cpus, fans, etc) just closed. one of the last in the city. decline in business.
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Model M keyboards are ridiculously good. They are consistent for every key, have great tactile feedback and are extremely durable.
The Model M did not appear until 1985, nearly four years after the original IBM PC.
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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.
The first release of OS/2 was a complete disaster. IBM was inundated with calls from customers who were having issues. They pulled every single person on the site into service as customer reps, without any training in OS/2! I was working on a UNIX project at the time and I was an Apple person - I had no clue how to help people with OS/2 or PCs but my manager did not like it when I tried to explain that. So I probably am listed somewhere as the worst OS/2 customer support person ever.
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The Model M did not appear until 1985, nearly four years after the original IBM PC.
Model F came out in 81 with same bucking springs
You can buy brand-new keyboards with this mechanism now from some small business (sorry, don't have a link handy), but even they offer Model M-like layouts because the original Model F layout is so awful.
The only good thing I can say about the Model F layout is that almost all microcomputers at that time had terrible keyboards, though the reasons they were terrible varied. Compared to junk like the Atari computer keyboards, it probably seemed great, though of course the IBM PC was far more expensive. For really great keyboards, at that time, you had to look at the business-level terminal keyboards and such.
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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.
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Model F came out in 81 with same bucking springs
The Model F sucked. The key mechanism was fantastic, but the layout was utter trash. The weird return key that's long vertically but has a one-key-sized raised section in the middle is the worst part of it. You can buy brand-new keyboards with this mechanism now from some small business (sorry, don't have a link handy), but even they offer Model M-like layouts because the original Model F layout is so awful. The only…
>> 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…
I remember in 2010, having to present to a team of Mainframe techs at a bank about how we would be integrating an Identity solution (that ran on Windows servers) into their Mainframes.
They couldn't stop making comments about how useless Windows is and it's just a gaming platform. One guy ranted and raged so hard that he stood up and stormed out of the room.
I remember my Project Manager who was in the meeting looked at them and said 'Guys, we talked about this earlier'...
I can see where that mindset comes from, these guys have been drinking the IBM Kool-Aid for a long time
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It's close to what Clayton Christensen describes as disruptive innovation (his examples were the steel industry and radio's): incumbents are forced higher up the chain by low quality competitors ("home computers are only good for gaming") that answer an unanswered need well enough. Once these competitors gain a foothold, quality improves and incumbents have less and less of a market.
It’s exactly what CC was writing about. It is the way large organizations think unless someone has the courage to recognize that if they don’t start a new division, some little upstart will eat their lunch. Kodak laughed at the early, feeble digital cameras. Bell Labs sat on DSL because it would kill T1 revenue. But man is it ever hard to execute. Andy Grove made every exec at Intel read Innovator’s Dilemma, but stil…
> "The system would do two things. It would draw an absolutely beautiful picture of a nude lady, ..." Lena? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna )
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 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…
"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 Google (and IBM's in this story and your final comment.)