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IBM Did Not Invent the Personal Computer
theodp writes "As IBM gives itself a self-congratulatory pat on the back as it celebrates its 100th anniversary, Robert X. Cringely wants to set the record straight: 'IBM didn't invent the personal computer', writes Cringely, 'but they don't know that.' Claiming to have done so, he adds, soils the legacy of Ed Roberts and pisses off all real geeks in the process. Throwing Big Blue a bone, Cringely is willing to give IBM credit for 'having helped automate the Third Reich'."
The truth about lulz : Edwin Black, an author holed up in his basement, spending years and years researching the details for a book, reading thousands of documents and talking with hundreds of people, will achieve far more lulz, in the long run, than hacking a website.
Black's book came out circa 2001. That is 10 years ago, and people still talk about it. And we still wait for IBM to open their archives.
Hmm, I sold personal computers for around 5 years before IBM rolled their first PC out, so I guess all the people that bought them will have to look back in embarrassment now that its been revealed that those really werent either personal or computers. Imsai, Altair, Poly, Xitan, Alpha Micro...all came long before IBM rolled anything out the door. Plus we thought the IBM PC was lousy. It had a weird keyboard layout and it was slow. Real expensive compared to other alternatives of the day. You could get a much faster cpu with more memory and a larger capacity floppy drive for half the price.
Yes, a bit hypocritical to just lay the blame at IBM's feet too. The US has a long history of doing business with criminal regimes from banana republics, to the nazi's, to apartheid South Africa, to regimes like Saudi Arabia today.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
A little bit.
I'm not exactly IBM's biggest fan (having to hammer on 370-series mainframes made me quite the IBM-hater for awhile), but to say that IBM automated the Nazis would be akin to saying that {insert item here} helped to {insert what that item does} the Nazis.
I mean, I'm pretty sure that WWII Germany had light bulbs, motion pictures, aircraft, NCR calculators (the old mechanical kind), and lots of other things pioneered by American individuals and companies. I'm also willing to bet that many of them were used directly in facilitating the Holocaust as well.
Hell, Henry Ford was an open admirer of Hitler's policies before (and even in the pre-US stages of) WWII, and an unabashed anti-semite... does that make the Ford Mustang a Nazimobile?
But yeah, basically, TFA is a Godwin.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I wouldn't call the Apple II exactly "obscure". And Apple was marketing using the term "Personal Computer" for at least a few years before the IBM PC came out.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Apple was using the term "Personal Computer" from the advent of the Apple ][ in 1977. IBM's trademark was the "IBM PC" -- remember the Charlie Chaplin adverts? So, no, sorry, IBM can't even claim that.
IBM put the first real personal computer on the market. Yes, prior to that I could have gone to the electronic store and bought the parts.
The only people who call this a personal computer are idiot geeks who will go to any stupid pedantry and verbal trick to 'be right' and 'know more'.
If the altair counts, then you must consider the Kenbak-1. So I win the internet.
From wikipedia : "The original line of PCs were part of an IBM strategy to get into the small personal computer market then dominated by the Commodore PET, Atari 8-bit family, Apple II, Tandy Corporation's TRS-80s, and various CP/M machines.[2]"
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
S-110 Bus systems
Radio Shack TRS-80.
Apple I
Commodore-64
Atari-800
TI 99/4
These were all the first personal computers. IBM had nothing to do with any of it.
IBM's only claim to fame is that their hardware specs allowed others to make similar systems.. so the "IBM PC" became manufacturable by many companies... and as a result... it beat out the proprietary hardware guys.
IBM has invented many things, but the personal computer is nothing they invented.
E
Just like Columbus did not actually discover America, IBM did not invent the personal computer. However, just like Columbus for all intents and purposes put America on the map, IBM did deliver the PC to the world in a way that no other did (or could) at the time.
Nobody "invented" the personal computer. Taking an existing product and making it cheaper/faster/smaller/cooler is not "inventing" anything, it is merely developing a better product.
Apple did not "invent" the smartphone, Toyota did not "invent" the hybrid, and Tivo did not "invent" recording video on hard disks either.
Be honest, you made that comment just because of the humor in a grammar nazi pointing out the error in "nazi's" didn't you ?
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Uh... but IBM actually did do a lot of contracting for the Nazis.
They weren't just Nazi sympathizers, they didn't just make general-purpose tools and end up having the Nazis use them, they worked with them extensively in a strategic alliance. They talked to them about what they wanted to get done, they helped them do it efficiently, and they put effort into hiding their role.
In particular, they were instrumental in accomplishing the identification of members of targeted ethnic groups, while being fully aware of the Nazi party's intent to persecute them. They provided the information infrastructure necessary to round up all of the jews and gypsies, knowing at the very least that they were to be rounded up.
It has the all the main personal computing features we associate with pre-Macintosh/Lisa systems, like a keyboard, CRT, local storage and user programmability. It probably predates the systems you sold by a year or two.
http://oldcomputers.net/ibm5100.html
Actually lets totally forget that, m'kay? Sometimes there is no need for shades of grey.
IBM *did* invent a few other things:
Magnetic Hard Drive
Reduced Operating Instruction Set architecture
Transistorized DRAM
Relational databases
Virtual machine operating systems
DES encryption
Scanning tunneling microscope
To name a tiny fraction. So, they do have some bragging rights.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
While this is true to be fair the ones doing business with the Nazis were the German branch and from what I understand in Hitler's Germany you did what you were told or enjoy your nice trip to the concentration camp. His regime weren't real tolerant of being told no, just look at how the German commanders captured (and secretly recorded0 by the Brits were all in agreement that attacking Russia was a majorly BAD idea, but none had the guts to walk up to the Fuhrer and tell him that.
As for TFA, frankly he is full of shit. Sure you may be able to say technically the first home computer that could be called personal wasn't an IBM, but does anyone run 6502 MOSFET chips anymore? Of course not because IBM PC compatible is the standard PERIOD. Hell even Apple now is IBM PC compatible.
As someone who lived through that time allow me to say thank you IBM, thank you for the 5150 and for being stupid enough to publish specs for everything back then which made building add ons easy. today it would be proprietary as hell and innovation would be right out the window, but thanks to IBM we don't have to throw everything out when we want to upgrade for performance. Folks seem to forget that before the 5150 NOTHING worked together, nothing talked to each other, the drives for A wouldn't work on B, hell even computers by the same company often had incompatible peripherals. As someone who had a Trash80 and a VIC20 frankly it was a royal PITA.
Now thanks to IBM you can buy AMD, Intel or Via, add more RAM or even a new box from a different OEM, it really doesn't matter as it all "just works". Thanks to the hardware being open we were able to route around the douches, like Compaq and their "special RAM", and now it doesn't matter what hardware or even OS you get, your printer still plugs in, you don't need IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots, it all is basically compatible. And frankly that is a GOOD thing. Now if we could only get the same thing in the mobile space, to where laptops had standard motherboards like ATX and mATX, to where we could easily repair or upgrade that would be heaven. Sadly it looks like proprietary in a box will stay in mobile land, which means designed for the dump since third parties can't make cheap parts. Damned shame but thank you IBM for at least giving us one platform that is easy to deal with.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
"Just"? You make that sound trivial, when it certainly was not.
Having been there, I can attest to the fact that IBM's PC did indeed legitimize the personal computer for not only businesses, but later for home users who, having used IBM PCs at work, wanted a familiar computer at home as well.
Back then, the mantra in business was "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", and that "magical pixie dust" settled onto the IBM PC as well... and later, with the advent of Compaq, and its "clean room" reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS, opened the door for all of the IBM PC compatible clones that came later, with BIOS' made by AMI, Phoenix and Award, and together they not only legitimized the PC market for business, but standardized it and the home personal computer market as well, while driving down prices as third-party manufacturers created computers based around them.
Hell, I was running a home LAN with IBM XT and AT clones, some booting from diskette [1], with an AT clone server running NetWare v2.0a (with a Seagate ST-4096 80MB MFM HD [2]), using ARCNET[3], back in 1988. Being able to centralized my programs, data, and share a printer was a HUGE thing for me, and for my customers as well.
Later, I upgraded my server to an 80386 clone, running NetWare v3, but still kept the 80 MB HD, and it was rock-solid, and the most reliable server I've ever had at home.
Now, you could say that it was all crude, and certainly it was, by today's standards... but I installed hundreds of LANs for small/medium-sized businesses back then, and the benefit they all gained was very real.
NONE of the latter would have been possible without IBM's PC: It not only standardized the hardware and bus, but standardized the client OS as well, which resulted in an explosion of development of not only business applications, but games, and software in general as well.
So, yeah, IBM didn't invent the "PC", and there's more than a little historical revisionism going on... but, to dismiss their effect on personal computing as "just" making it mainstream for business does them disservice as well.
Regards,
dj
[1] Hard drives were very expensive back then, so it was cheaper to use one large, expensive HD in a file server, and boot the workstations from diskette... and keep a box of backup boot diskettes on hand, just in case *grin*
[2] Seagate's ST-4096 was a state-of-the-art HD then: With 28ms average access speeds, capable of running at 1 to 1 interleave, it was blisteringly fast, and very reliable. Not to mention the fact that 80MB was "Huge tracts of storage"... when I installed one a customer, long before I could afford one myself, I asked him "So, what are you going to do with so much storage?" His answer? "Anything I want" *grin*.
[3] We used ARCNET for our customers, because the NICs were FAR less expensive than Ethernet NICs. We used SMC's NICs, until Thomas-Conrad came along, and beat them not only in price, but performance - T-C's ARCNET NICs used less upper memory in enhanced mode (4K vs. 16K or 32K as I recall), and their drivers were a LOT more efficient/faster.. later, they sold a "Universal Turbo" ARCNET NIC driver that worked with any ARCNET NIC, but made their NICs a LOT faster, and that was HUGE, too, from a management perspective: We only had to use one driver, regardless of NIC manufacturer.
Back in the pre-Ethernet switch days, ARCNET also performed a lot better under load than Ethernet with the same node count per network segment, despite "only" running at 2.5Mbps vs. Ethernet's theoretical 10Mbps...and it scaled deterministically as well. In addition, ARCNET over RG-62/U coax could be run 3000 feet, active port to active port, which helped minimize the number of active hubs needed, and offered FAR more flexibility in the real world.
[4] This footnote has no referral - but I suppose that this is where I should say "You damn kids get off my lawn!" *grin*
Nostalgically,
dj
Agree with the first responder. There are memos proving beyond a doubt that Thomas J. Watson himself was not only informed about what was going on, but himself helped plan it and actively engaged in doing business with the Nazis.
Part of that business was supplying machines that kept track of concentration camp prisoners via punch card.
Was IBM all bad? No. But was it some bad, especially during the Nazi Germany days? Hell, yes! The historical record has proven it beyond reasonable doubt. Of course, Watson and IBM were not the only corporate or finance bigwigs who did that kind of thing at the time, but do it they definitely did.
You missed the point.
IBM supplied Germany with machines and intelligence during the war, with full knowledge of Thomas Watson himself. Which at the time, if he were caught, would probably have gotten him charges of treason and aiding and abetting the enemy, at the very least.
There is strong physical evidence, including memos, invoices, and receipts, indicating that IBM (and I mean the US offices, not just some German branch) actively, during the war, supplied the Nazis with machines that were used to keep track of prisoners at concentration camps, and instruction on how to use them.
Proud Italian Americans tend to say, that once Columbus discovered America, it stayed discovered.
But that's not a good analogy for IBM's contribution to the PC. The fact is that the PC was already there, and had a decent market, and was starting to make dramatic inroads into small and medium businesses thanks to the PC's first killer-app VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet program). This program first ran on the AppleII and propelled Apple from a small (actually fairly dominant) enthusiast company to Silicon Valley's latest wunderkind. This was well before IBM got into the marketplace. But everyone knew they would, considering the surge, and the rapidly expanding business market. The thing was that at the time, IBM's entry was met with quite a bit of disappointment. We were all expecting great things, but that was decidedly not what the 1st IBM PC was. A run of the mill CPU married to an also-ran OS. Not a step forward so much as a step sideways. Also a significant departure was that none of this stuff was actually developed by IBM, but by Intel, and an unknown snot-nosed kid with a bad haircut, who's mom was on IBM's board at the time. And yet, it was destined to become a huge thing. The technology decision makers in business were certainly no more savvy then than they are now. Why did it take off? "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was what was often said.
So, as it turns out, the singular thing that IBM contributed to the PC was its logo.
Exactly! It was a now-classic consulting scenario: the business (e.g, Nazi Germany) buys a big shiny piece of hardware, and with it they get some IBM consultants to customize it. The business comes up with its business rules, e.g, every generation the Jewishness halves if a Jew marries a non-Jew, anyone who is at least 1/64th Jewish is considered a Jew, and here's some census data that says who has claimed to be a Jew up until the current moment who has married whom (gotta ferret out those crypto-Jews, sneaky though they are), and we want names and addresses out of it. Then the consultants go hmm okay that'll be $lots and implement the system.
It would have absolutely impossible for IBM's consultant programmers to have worked on this project without realizing that Hitler would be using this information to round up citizens based on their ethnicity. I can totally accept that the consultants didn't realize that the Jews would be killed (it's hard to believe that people are going to die as a result of your work, honestly), but there was no way for them to have done this without realizing that, you know, the names and addresses are popping out of our tabulating machine and going straight to the Gestapo who all run out waving truncheons.
Sure you may be able to say technically the first home computer that could be called personal wasn't an IBM, but does anyone run 6502 MOSFET chips anymore?
Of course not, any more than anybody runs Intel 8088 chips anymore, uses an ISA expansion bus, Shugart disc interfaces etc. I even believe that modern systems can have more than 640K of RAM...
The 6502 might not have had any official surviving children (ISTR there was a 16-bit variant used in the Apple II GS), but its pretty well documented that it was a major influence on the design of the ARM.
Hell even Apple now is IBM PC compatible.
No, Apple uses chips based on the modern x86-32 and x86-64 architectures. I don't think the fact that these have legacy backwards-compatibility with the 8088 was a major influence on Apple's decision to switch. That has more to do with IBM and Motorola's failure to manufacture a mobile version of the PPC G5, at a time when Apple was doing rather well with non-Intel based machines...
As someone who lived through that time
You must have been very, very drunk, because you don't remember it very well.
Folks seem to forget that before the 5150 NOTHING worked together, [snip] As someone who had a Trash80 and a VIC20
Which is why, pre-PC, serious commercial microcomputer users tended to use one of the many CP/M-based systems rather than VIC20s, to the extent that there were even kludges available to run CP/M on Trash-80s and Apple IIs (the latter requiring a Z80 system on an expansion card). This is what IBM-lovers like to airbrush out of history because the "revolutionary" IBM PC was really just a "me too" CP/M-86 machine (MS-DOS/PC-DOS being, effectively, a clone of CP/M).
Now thanks to the failure of the IBM PS/2 and MicroChannel architecture you can buy...
There, put that right for you.
your printer still plugs in,
Nice to know that IBM invented the Centronics and RS232 interfaces, and that anybody who remembers using those on non-IBM computers is delusional.
you don't need IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots
You seem to think IBM invented the PCI bus. They didn't - the original ISA bus had "IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots" up the wazzoo.
Now if we could only get the same thing in the mobile space, to where laptops had standard motherboards like ATX and mATX
If only people didn't want their mobiles to be slim, and light, and, well, mobile...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
This is correct. The original PC/XT was good, the AT keyboard even better. The chicklet PCjr keyboard was junk.
I can't imagine any college at that time teaching programming on PC-DOS 1.0. Don't believe it.
All IBM has to do to corroborate your hypothesis is to open up their archives, and show through written communication that the international leadership was indeed side-stepped by the SA goons. IBM hasn't opened up these archives, unlike most other companies involved with the Nazis, therefore I highly doubt that the head-honchos in New York at the time were innocent.
Uhh they helped them put people into categories for eugenics purposes just like they did here in the USA or did you forget that we were sterilizing undesirables and putting out books on how negroid and mongoloid features were proof they were inferior to white races?
As someone who actually got to hear about liberating one of the polish camps from my grandfather who was there frankly nobody believed the stories until we actually got to the first camps, which is why Patton and Ike made the scenes be recorded and shuffled the townspeople of the nearby villages through the camps to witness the horror. We thought the stories were just so much bullshit just as the stories being spread by Lord Haw Haw and Axis Sally, which had the Nazis slaughtering the Americans in huge numbers while kicking the Russian ass.
So while hindsight is 20/20 most people at the time thought it would be used for sterilization (not nice either, but what we in the USA were doing) not for systemic slaughter. Sadly there are no true good guys with clean hands in that war, you had the Russians and the rape of Berlin as well as mass slaughter of German POWs, the rape of Nanking by the japs as well as experimenting on prisoners (which we let them get away with in return for the data) and you had the USA doing terror bombings as well as two atomics on a country that frankly had had it and was no longer able to put up any real defense.
Despite all the "America Fuck yeah!" attached to that war the simple fact is total war is a brutal thing but we were a little more naive back then and as my grandfather said "If I wouldn't have seen the cattle cars with my own eyes I would have called you a liar." because until they got to the camps they just hadn't seen any indication that the truth wasn't they had sent the Jews east, which is what everyone believed at the time.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.