On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 16:37:44 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:



wrote in message
.. .
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 15:03:50 +1100, "Rod Speed"
wrote:



wrote in message
...
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 17:08:39 -0800 (PST), trader_4
wrote:

On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 2:45:38 PM UTC-5,
wrote:


They gave the PC business away to establish the x86 standard and pave
the way for their proprietary machine. Although most people seldom
ever saw a PS/2 except on TV, it was very successful for IBM in the
business world. The goal was to replace every dumb terminal with a
PS/2 and that was very successful.

You are operating under the delusion that big old IBM, which should be a
dumb monopoly like AT&T if I follow you, somehow could see the whole
future of the computer industry in 1981 when they took a flyer on a
PC when no one at the time could even figure out why anyone needed one
or what they would do with it.

IBM was already talking about the "distributed
computing" model in the mid 70s

Yes and others were doing it too, particularly DEC.

and the PC was the perfect platform for it.

No it was not. It didn't have anything like the horsepower
then to do much of that. Useful for word processing and
spreadsheets etc but not for true distributed computing.

IBM still envisioned PCs being connected to mainframes

That's wrong too. Most PCs never were.
They were standalone computers.

and that is why their main thrust was at the business world.

It never was with the PC. That came later with
the PS/2 and still wasn't true with the stupid PCjr.

You can't keep ignoring the PCjr, it's the proof that
your claim about what IBM's intentions were with
the PC are just plain wrong. They were clearly
attempting to cover the entire market with their
products and failed dismally at the low end.

An expensive operation like IBM was never going
to make any money on something like the PCjr and
it was never about setting standards with it either.

The PC Jr was a joke as was the PS/1 and I doubt anyone really cared
much about it. That was at a time when IBM was throwing anything they
could at the wall and hoping it would stick. It was marketed by the
remnants of the typewriter division who knew their ass was grass. They
also tried to sell a copier and a bunch of other bull**** that never
went anywhere. The whole division was sold for a pittance to Kodak.


They gave away the x86 consumer business,

Bull**** they did.

just to establish the standard.

That didn't happen either. And while they tried to do that with
the PS/2, they failed dismally because the industry ignored it.

There is no better way to flood the market
than to give the technology away for free.

They never flooded the market. And they realised their
mistake with including the circuit diagrams and bios
code with the PC and XT and didn't do it with the AT

You also got PC DOS for free with your system.
(Not MS DOS, PC DOS, the one IBM owned)

51xx PCs were totally off the shelf parts and the 5150 PC-1
was shipped with full schematics and engineering documents.

And the bios code listing too.

The 3270 coax card and 5250 twinax cards were part of the original
PS/2 announcement, allowing them to immediately replace a dumb
terminal. They already had 3270 versions of the PC and PC/AT with
an identical keyboard so it was seamless for the operator.

And few bothered to buy them.

I am not sure about what happened in the upside down
world south of the equator but we sold the **** out of
PCs being used as smart terminals here in the US.

**** all in fact compared with 3270s etc. The absolute
vast bulk of PCs, XTs and ATs were in fact used as
standalone computers used for word processing,
spreadsheets and later running stuff like POS software.

If they had a mainframe, the PCs were networked to it most of the
time.
If they didn't have a mainframe they were not big enough for IBM to
give a **** about them.



In fact by the time that most small businesses were
computerised, **** all used any IBM PCs even in the USA.

In fact by the early 90s it was getting hard to find dumb
terminals in anything but the places with the simplest
applications with marginally trained workers.

Sure, but that's much later than the original PC.

Places like offices, insurance companies, hospitals and
such, they had gotten rid of their dumb terminals and
put in PCs by the time I retired in 96.

Yes, but they were not IBM machines.

They were even using PCs in Burger King
and Wendy's for the cash registers.

But hardly ever with an IBM machine.


BK used a regular PS/2 M/30 and Wendy's
had them in a custom cabinet but it was still
a M/30 system board, unaltered in any way.

And far more didn't use any IBM hardware at all.

It was the standard for corporate owned restaurants. Franchise owners
could run what they want but they still had to talk to the same
mainframes