On Saturday, February 9, 2019 at 10:36:39 PM UTC-5, wrote:
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 and the PC was the perfect platform for it.
IBM still envisioned PCs being connected to mainframes and that is why
their main thrust was at the business world.

Silly me, I thought all this time that IBM's main thrust was in the
business world because it's International Business Machines and the
business market was essentially their whole business for 100 years.




They gave away the x86
consumer business, just to establish the standard.

The actual history shows that IBM was as perplexed about the nascent
personal computer business and there was no grand scheme. And there was
no x86 business at that point, the PC was introduced not in the business
market, but the personal computing, home market.





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

Which IBM didn't do. They did encourage other companies to develop
software and hardware add-ons.



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

Nothing unusual there, Apple and others were doing the same thing.
It's not giving it away for free, it's including it in the purchase
price. A PC would be fairly useless without an OS.



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