On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 14:23:58 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:

wrote
Rod Speed wrote

IBM was broken up tho

No it wasnt. IBM chose to hive off what it
decided werent profitable for them anymore.

Not true at all

We'll see...

IBM split off 7 sectors of it's company into 7 separate operating units

Because that was the fashion at that time. And it wasnt new then
either, IBM was never just one massive great monolith that did
everything from punched card machines, mainframes etc.

and it wasn't until the 90s that they actually started selling them off.

That bit is certainly correct.

The thinking was if the government actually did win and they
were forced to break up, they already would be broken up.

Wrong. It was just the fashion of the time. Hewlett Packard did
it too and so did DEC. So did Xerox and so did AT&T long before
they were broken up. All massive great operations have to do that.

Those sectors were totally independent of each other
and actually bought and sold things between each other.

Sure, but that wasnt due to the threat of being broken up by
govt. And isnt why IBM chose to have a separate operation with
a radically different approach to doing things for the PC either.

The reality was the products were so dissimilar, developed
separately and manufactured separately so there was not
much in common to swap back and forth.

Thats not so true of some parts of IBM like the terminals etc.

In fact in the early 90s when they merged them back together,
there was virtually no economy of scale since virtually none
of the hardware or software were interchangeable and the
training was pretty useless across those platforms too.

Sure, but that was due to the radical diversity of what IBM
chose to get involved in. Of course there is **** all in the
way of interchange ability between punched card equipment
and mainframes. And not much between mainframes and
PCs or even their mid range machines like the Series/1 etc
let alone the 3270 etc.

They had totally different cultures.

Of course they did, mainframes are nothing like
punched card machines, the PC or the PS/2 either.

IBM corporate was just operating as a holding
company, at least in the bookkeeping.

Nothing to do with any threat of breakup.

That was never going to happen.


OK I guess a person living in the belly of the beast does not know as
much as someone on the other side of the planet but that is what they
told us at the time.
I guess the IBM people you worked for in Oz had a different story.
Oh wait the DoJ was not trying to Prosecute IBM, World Trade in
Australia.