Comments on: The great PC 'what-if'

Imagine what the tech industry would be like if IBM had demanded exclusive rights to its PC operating system.

[Remo_Williams]

...and my career never really changes.

Scenario one or two, doesn't matter to me. I started with an Apple //e, migrated to PCs only in college, and had my first job on a mainframe. I was a newsgroup reader then and still am. I think I'd actually have become a more hardcore programmer if either alternate universe existed. In any case, I'd still be rich, *****!

-R

[ldhoover1]

other OS...

I think it's a shame that the Amiga never got a chance
an OS kernal so smalll it could fit on an 880K disk ALONG WWITH a
program or game
Distributed memory - protected memory - running more than one
program at a time - mouse interface on a system which would
emullate a MS-Dos machine (slowly) and could even run the same
program multiple times ( just ask the NASA and JPL controlors how
helpful it was to debug running programs)
This was in 1985

[Collants]

Yes

I find it strange that critics and journalists ignore Commodore machines altogether. Even Radio Shack's TRS-80 is mentioned in this article.

[The user with no name]

commodore

Had CBM not had a huge turnover of there execs (I think it was like 5 in 5 years!) and had better foresight about the whole 'personal/home' computing thing taking off instead of thinking mainly about their business machine end of things, I believe that they would have been the major PC player for years to come.

They had the first true multi-tasking ability. There was a GUI based s/w interface available for the Commodore line WAY before Windows hit the market. The Amiga graphics were so far ahead of it's time it was amazing (in fact many people still use Amigas for graphic/video editing).

I started out on a VIC 20 (whopping 3K of RAM and a tape drive) and graduated to a C-64 the first year they came out. I always thought they were better than the Apple or Radio Shack alternatives having used Apple IIe's AND C-64's in two different schools and seeing a friends Tandy box lol.

So had CBM had better CEO retention and focus who knows what we could have ended up with.

[martingreg3]

880k diskettes on amiga

the biggest problem was the lack of a hard disk, 20 Mbytes would have been a dream, I did hear about a few in 1988/90 but never saw one. I was going to build one but I could never get hold of a cirduit for the external interface. It's not too late I think my youngest daughter still has her Atari 512 so if she has maybe I will knock up a simple PIO interface for the standard EIDE disk.

[martingreg3]

880k diskettes on amiga

the biggest problem was the lack of a hard disk, 20 Mbytes would have been a dream, I did hear about a few in 1988/90 but never saw one. I was going to build one but I could never get hold of a cirduit for the external interface. It's not too late I think my youngest daughter still has her Atari 512 so if she has maybe I will knock up a simple PIO interface for the standard EIDE disk.

[martingreg3]

880k diskettes on amiga

the biggest problem was the lack of a hard disk, 20 Mbytes would have been a dream, I did hear about a few in 1988/90 but never saw one. I was going to build one but I could never get hold of a cirduit for the external interface. It's not too late I think my youngest daughter still has her Atari 512 so if she has maybe I will knock up a simple PIO interface for the standard EIDE disk.

It should be simple enough. If any one eklse is intersted let me know then I will look at a USB and possibly a PCI interface, I know VIA used to do one for the 68k family, and then all one would have to do is knock up some code fro driving things like a modern display, offloading the GUI interface to a GP on a PCI card and hey presto one cold even think of running apple software or portable stuff.

I would love to see an old Atari wizzing along.

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[dcvchigago]

The second OD

One fact that seems to be missing is the 'other' operating system that was offered with the original IBM 5150--CP/M, the dominant operating system of its day. As I recall, the original plan was to offer the 5150 as a CP/M machine, but Digital Research, Inc., it owner, held out for top dollar from IBM.

As a backup, IBM turned to a small software company, Microsoft, who said they had a CP/M clone available. Microsoft agreed to license it to IBM on the cheap, in a non-exclusive deal.
The benefit to IBM? It lowered the price point of the machine. At the time, the press (and IBM) expected most buyers to go with CP/M.

IBM wasn't concerned about non-exclusivity, because it felt that its BIOS made the machine uncloneable. But Phoenix reverse-engineered the BIOS, and the rest, as they say, is history.

So why didn't Compaq (and the other clone makers) go with CP/M? MS-DOS was cheaper, it had the blessing of IBM (it was branded IBM PC-DOS on the 5150), and it ran Visicalc.

So, that's why IBM didn't press Microsoft for exclusivity. No clones, no need. So, why not save a few bucks?

[myshellbeach]

why didn't IBM sue Phoenix for copyright infringement

If IBM thought its BIOS was the key to preventing others from cloning its system, why did't IBM sue Phoenix for reverse engineering their system. It seems to be an obvious case of stealing a BIOS from another company.

What is the rest of that story?

[bhushan bhaagii]

BUT FOR IBM, BILL GATES WOULD NOT BE EVEN A FOOTNOTE

The events happened a long time. But the (apochryal?) story goes, that IBM sought out a DOS, from Bill Gates, who simply walked across to
the next office (of Digital),bought out their DOS outright, and licenced it to IBM.

IBM could have easily bought the stuff outright from Bill Gates, but remember they had been through a bruising, battering anti-trust campaig. Perhaps they were wary of being once again charged with creating a monopoly in the PC market. And so, they didn't tie Gates down to exclusivity.

Whatever may have been the merits of AMIGA, Commoddore and other desktops at that time, one thing is clear: IBM created the PC, and marketed it brilliantly. Two decaded down, I do not remember the details, but Advertising Age had carried an indepth feature on the advertising campaign that IBM created for the PC, using a Charlie-Chaplin look-alike to convey the easy of
use of the IBM PC.

The campaign really connected with viewers and users, and the next thing, IBM's PC

Bill Gates probably learnt a lot from this about how

[stskhalsa]

Or...

Today's OS's are based, not on CPM/86 (which DOS copied -
down to dummy code), but on Unix, which was around long
before the PC, or, for that matter, the Altair. The user interfaces
displayed by virtually all the modern OS's have their roots, not at
Apple (although they really commercialized and refined it), or
Microsoft, which, hamstrung by their installed base tried to graft
Apple's interface onto DOS to make Windows, but at XEROX Palo
Alto Research Center.

Modern operating systems are, in their heart of hearts, a
combination of the work of Bell Labs and Xerox, way before
Seattle Computer Products copied Digital Research's CPM to
make the OS Bill bought and then sold to IBM.

[steve4lee]

What MS OS?

The first scenario sounds like it assumes that Microsoft had an
OS lying around, or that it was in the process of building one, or
at least considering doing it. But that wasn't the case. It was
the IBM deal that put them into the OS business. No deal, and
there was no obvious reason for Gates to buy QDOS, a CP/M
clone, to use for PC/MS DOS. The no-deal scenario also ignores
a very likely option for IBM: CP/M. That's what they wanted in
the first place, and the owner's wife was rude to an IBM rep or
something. W/o MS, IBM may have given the CP/M folk another
shot after time to reconsider.

[Macsaresafer]

Exactly.

MS would have been swallowed up by other software developers.
Maybe a real innovator of the time, like Beagle Brothers. ;)

[Craig Jones]

phoenix cloned the BIOS?

All the major vendors in the early days made their own BIOS (including Dell who wasn't so big then). Only much later did many of the vendors switch as Phoenix was the domain of the small cloner in the beginning. The market wouldn't be any different today had Phoenix not existed.

[mike.gw]

I think IBM gets too much credit here

The original IBM PC was Big Blue's attempt to get into personal computing with as little investment as possible. Much of the original IBM PC was created from off the shelf parts, with IBM's main innovation being the BIOS. Once Phoenix cloned the BIOS, anyone could make an IBM PC clone.

When IBM realized how much control they lost in a clone friendly marketplace, they tried to steal back the standard by creating the PS/2 (no kids, not Playstation) line of PCs. Unlike the first PC, the PS/2 was chock full of proprietary IBM technology, like PS/2 ports and Microchannel bus and VGA graphics. It even offered a new proprietary OS called OS/2. All available for licensing! :)

It would be interesting to check old news archives and see if IBM ever attempted to sue Phoenix, or halt the sales of their BIOS clone chip. I believe that it was never IBM's intention to help create a thriving clone marketplace that would eventually have them selling off their PC line to a tech firm in China. IBM's rush to marketplace with off the shelf parts and very little IBM in-house technology was a folly that they probably regretted very much in the mid-eighties.

[dsherr1]

What about Unix??

No What-If for PC if you do not factor in Unix. In 1981-3, there were a number of Unix Super Micros that cost from $5-20K (Fortune on the low end and Onyx on the higher end). The key was that the Internet was built upon Unix. So, with the inexorable down costing of hardware, these unix based machines would have been competitive if the PC market had not taken off with IBM cloning. It was the independence of MS DOS that made the PC market. At any rate, it appears likely that the Intenet would have developed despite the PC as it was in place already, albeit at ARPANET. It was Unix that powered the Open Systems movement. The promise of this movement has been fulfilled through Linux and its attendant Open Source of today despite the openness of the PC hardware. BTW, it was Unix that took the wind out of IBM's big systems growth and kicked the heck out of DEC by 1988. There are many other equally compelling What-Ifs which require using ALL the knowledge of the history of computing.

[DaveClebTx]

Where would we be if the PC OS's had not been created and updated?

If it were not for the competition of the PC, MAC and other micro computers that have now fallen by the wayside, where would we have been in the advancement of other technologies?

We are all forgetting about the many advancements that came about to propell many other technologies. How many other technologies and industries may not have even came into being if it we not for the advancement needed to manage the more complex operating systems that came into the market place because of this competition.

What about the higher computing power of the microprocessers that came from these advancements, whch allowed for the advancement of science in many fields.

Medicine, bio-techonlogies, space programs, and the exploration of the depths of the oceans, just to name a few. All from the opportunity being given to bright minds of the world, and not just a few people within a corporate environment.

Just a thought!

[Macsaresafer]

Think how much further along

things would be if MS didn't have their monopoly. Apple wouldn't
be their only competitor from that era to survive, and that would
have resulted in much more innovation.

[aabcdefghij987654321]

Lotus

The extremely narrow view of history provided by this article doesn't even begin to cover the what-if. It was the Spreadsheet that got PCs into businesses and by providing volume purchases brought the prices down to a point that the average Joe would consider bying their own PC. Without spreadsheets corporate accountants would've required a lot more justification for buying PCs. The IBM brand also carried a lot of cachet back then so IT departments that wouldn't allow the purchase of an Apple or a Commodore had a much harder time rejecting the purchase of an IBM.

But again the real kicker that started up the PC business for IBM and therefore made it attractive to clone makers was the demand caused by the simple availability of the spreadsheet. In fact while Dan Bricklin created the first spreadsheet for the Apple ][ it was the greater ability of Lotus 123 on the IBM PC which drove the adoption of the IBM PC.

To return to the What-if scenario it's likely that the spreadsheet would've still won over the accountants regardless of whatever platform they had to acquire in order to get it, that's why it's been called a "killer app".

[ajbright]

Hugely amusing

Several comments from this story are hugely amusing, for one the suggestion that if Microsoft caved innovation might still be alive and well - too funny, as it's a well known fact that MS has managed to hold back technology between 5 and 8 years. Some people will no doubt mention Unix, others Linux, but for me the real crime was that the Commodores and Ataris of this world never had the chance to re-capture the market they once dominated in the 80s. Most of that was down to mismanagement at those companies, but no small part of the blame must also go to the sheep at large corporates that didn't even have the guts to choose Apple over IBM clones.

The second funny is the suggestion a third party might have appeared if IBM / MS failed to dominate the market, but the Internet would have failed to make inroads into the home because of the lack of an affordable PC. This is hilarious as much cheaper and much more capable computers, with internet connectivity, were around years prior to it being possible to connect to the internet via Windows. Again, fully multitasking operating systems, on true multimedia platforms capable of 3D animation, video editing amongst other things, were on the market in the 80s for under $1000 ($2000 for the cheapest IBM Clone) - by the beigning of the 90s under $400 - you'd be lucky if you could find an IBM clone less than double that price at that time, as for one that was capable of running even a basic GUI that looked more like a file manager or an ftp client than a true OS, well sure you could get it, but not for less than $1500.

Even Apple's Mac couldn't do pre-emptive multitasking until at least the mid nineties, and windows didn't achieve this (without crashing if you looked at it funny) until NT 4.0 was released.

No, the inept management (if you could call them management) at Commodore especially blew away a competitive edge of 5-8 years. They had more than 50% of the personal computer market (CBM Pet) when the Amiga was released, and it would take at least 5 years before its features were even matched - by a PC that required a processor running 5 times the speed of the Amiga's, with 16 times the amount of RAM and occupied at at the very least 10 times the amount of HD space.

Unfortunately they decided to waste money developing dead end chipsets (with no significant steps forward over their original hardware design), waste more money flying around in private Jets, lost then entire OS and chipset design for the world's first 32-bit home computer (forcing them to reverse engineer their own roms and custom processors), thought that TV advertising wasn't worth the money, and then tried to save their entire company by releasing a games console based on a technology they'd had in development for something like 5 years too long.

Like I said, it wasn't until this time that products from Microsoft and Apple, as well as the computers that ran them, even caught up with the Amiga - which meant that had a decent company been in control, or even a ruthless one like IBM, Microsoft or Apple, we'd have had todays PCs or Macs at least 5 if not 8 years ago.

[Andrew J Glina]

I agree about the Amiga

The Amiga should have won. It was the best for a long time, but it was not seen as a anything but a toy by many. Commodore was no better. Al they seemed interested in doing was releasing PC clones, proving to many that it was just a game machine. I kept waiting for Commodore to make a real upgrade, but by the time they released the 1200 it was too little too late.

It was a sad day for me when I gave up on the Amiga. For anyone who does not realise how good the Amiga was I heavily recommend looking into it. To save some the effort, when the Amiga 1000 was released it had pre-emptive multitasking, full colour (up to 4096) GUI, long filenames, graphics and sound co-processors. I think Commodore (who didn't design the Amiga, they just bought the company that did) only wanted it as a Commodore 64 sequel, and refused to market as anything else. How one could look at a 80s PC and say "Wow this is better than what we have!" still has be perplexed today.

[maxthecat]

There were alternatives

I remember ancient history. At the time of MSDOS1 there was CMP86, a superior and better developed OS. At the same time Victor sold successfully a Intel 8088 chip PC with 2 1.2Mb 5.25inch floppies, a much superior machine to IBM's 315 or 360Kb disk machine.

[JadedGamer]

Even earlier what-if

I have heard a story where IBM first went shopping for a processor, and underestimated the number of PCs they would sell, so Motorola chose not to build the extra factory needed - leading to the decision to go for Intel's family.

What if Motorola's 68k family of chips had become the PC core? There wasn't a CP/M for it, IIRC - so where would they turn? Atari (ST), Commodore (Amiga) and Sun all had 68k-based computers and operating systems. Imagine running PCs from day one with GUI in the form of an IBM-licensed Workbench or GEM...

[cyboreric]

What if: Jobs wasn't a hippy

Maybe Apple would be king. What if Jobs let's OSX out of the bag and licenses it to third parties? The interesting thing is they could still do it and it would take off like wild fire. I think Jobs assumes that option is always available...too bad.

[JadedGamer]

Apple licensing? Not a chance

If you have forgotten your computer history, after Jobs was kicked out, Apple DID license out to other manufacturers like Power Computing or whatever they were called, and they made Mac-technology servers. These licensing deals combined with a too-low supply of "real" Apple machines nearly killed them, and the first thing Jobs did when he was brought back was to cancel the licensing deals. And then to remake the NEXT operating system as OSX.

Therefore it's EXTREMELY unlikely Apple will license ANYTHING out, whether it's OSX or that DRM they use for iTunes.

[JadedGamer]

Microsoft = compiler makers

I dunno; IIRC Microsoft did have a healthy business going at the time making and licensing compilers and interpreters for various OSes and computer manufacturers. Their BASIC dialect(s) was licensed a lot for instance, and they had some Pascal and Fortran things going. Even if IBM had chosen DR's CP/M or eventually CP/M-86, Microsoft would probably still have been the ones making the BASIC.

I don't know whether Compas was around that early, though; if so, IBM might have bought them or licensed their more mature Basic variant Comal-80 - or even their Pascal compiler; the one that went on to become Turbo Pascal.

[startiger]

How about....

What if someone took a que from Compaq and reverse engineered DOS?

The open hardware has been great for the developement of the technology. The simple fact that you have lots of companies all competing for market share has caused it to advance more that it would have other wise. Other vendors who didn't use the PC archetechure and were left with small parts of marketshare only coppied everything else, they came up with little on thier own, and tended to be slower and much more expensive.

So what would have happened in the OS market if someone came out with a fully legal product in the mid 80's marketed as "Fully MS compatible, but slightly cheaper"? (What Compaq did with IBM.) Even as late as the early 90's. Before microsoft got into making the bloated and complicated software they do today, other companies would have an easier time getting into the market.

So Microsoft has competition on their own terf. This gives rise to more OS's. Each trying to make a better, faster, easier, and cheaper product that still runs all PC software.

THAT would be an interesting question.

[aabcdefghij987654321]

That's not a what-if, it happened!

Try looking up DR-DOS. Just like with IE 6 vs Firefox, MS got complacent and was doing nothing with DOS until Digital Research came out with a pretty good DOS alternative, then MS got serious and started working on newer versions of DOS again.

[Danathar]

You Ignore Atari and Commodore

In 1983 it was Commodore NOT Apple which was flying high. Had the IBM PC not dominated it's not clear WHO would of triumphed.

Any of the three other dominant players Atari, Commodore AND Apple could taken over.

[mjd420nova]

Microsoft started it

When Compaq went to MS and gave them the parameters of the OS they wanted MS to write for them, it was the logical choice. Those parameters were to take a PC that operated in such a manner that it didn't violate any hardware copyrights held by IBM and make it work and run just like an IBM PC and run any of the software presently written for the IBM. That opened the door, Compaq even let MS call it MSDOS. It has been onward and upward since. With that proliferation, none could match BIG BLUE, or it's offshoots. APPLE had a good idea but fell down when they refused to let any other companies write software for or build and sell hardware pieces for their platforms. Big mistake that they are paying for today. Intel bought into the idea and quickly used their technology and research to make the processors smaller and faster and then expanded from 8 bit to 16 bit, and finally to the present 64 bit processors. Where will it end?? I don't think there is and end to this, as long as there is money to be made and users who demand fast machines. Why quit now??

[Ravendon]

Steve Jobs Invented The Web

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory

The World Wide Web was created on a NeXT machine. The first web server was released to the "High Energy Physics community at first, and to the hypertext and NeXT communities in the summer of 1991."

So I guess we people in the real world don't know the "rest of the story" as well as we thought we did.

===============

"You know the rest of the story... The Web was invented and became wildly popular, and many think the PC was a key to making that happen because it was an ideal platform to access the online world...."

[georgiarat]

IBM was not really out to make a great PC

IBM was really interested in having their PC as a word processing
unit and as a terminal replacement for the old 3270 screens. In
other words a smart terminal. They then used their
overwhelming clout with corporate america to get the machines
into every business. The PC was not a great machine and the OS
had nothing to do with the success. Any OS that achieved IBM's
goal would have succeeded at that time. Only a couple of years
later with the standard DOS on other manufacturers equipment
did Compaq and others succeed. IBM still controlled the PC
world and may have continued to do so if MS had not double-
crossed IBM, Lotus, Wordperfect and others by not sticking wih
development of OS/2 but releasing Windows that at the time
only MS apps would work with well. MS gained not only the
dominance in the operating system but the desktop apps as
well.

[martingreg3]

continuation (you have a bad editor, (windows tabs command)

foolowing on from what I was saying about our various now historic kit. We had two Digital 250s one running unix and the other Digital's VMS which still has better software audit and control facilities than any other machine I have seen. Now port VMS to Unix/Linux and I would be impressed !!!

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