bob.gool...@gmail.com (Bob goolsby) writes: > And what would have been the alternative OS for IBM to have backed? OS/2???
at the time, linux was somewhat the stage of the hobbiest personal computers before the advent ibm/pc. the ibm/pc clone market was starting to build massive consumer base ... including gaming market (which wasn't being addressed by the linux hobbiest) ... but only small part of that was bleeding into linux computer hobbiests. os/2 & ps2 was industrial strength commercial market ... as well as somewhat helping support the mainstream computing market. this was period of "help your brethern" ... and "terminal emulation" (SAA) strategy ... attempting to stave off the client/server that was impacting the communication group (terminal emulation) install base ... misc. posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#emulation the workstation division had come out with rs/6000 ... and was being told it had to use the ps2 adapter cards (also as part of helping corporate brethern). this strategy makes the rs/6000 only marginally better than ps2. The ps2 microchannel 16mbit T/R card had lower card thruput (as part of "terminal emulation" strategy ... 300+ ps2 sharing same 16mbit t/r) than the pc/rt (rs/6000 workstation precursor) ISA 4mbit/sec t/r card. The ps2 microchannel scsi card had really high command processing overhead and low thruput. The ps2 graphics adapter card was really, really slow (compared to products in the workstation market). The ps2 graphics adapter countermeasure (since workstation division wasn't allowd to do their own) ... came out with the 730 deskside ... basically a 530 with extra wide cabinet with internal VMEbus with non-IBM VMEbus graphics adapter (the argument being that ps2 wasn't offering a VMEbus graphics adapter). The boca ps2 & os2 was off in their own world with regard to where the business was going ... as well as what was happening with commodity pricing with the clones. There were internal documents showing comptition selling "best price" massive bulk purchase (hundreds of machines) was close to ps2. To try and counteract, I would post (on internal forums) clone quantity-one prices from the sunday newspaper (that were way below what Boca was showing clone large volume "best prices" in their business plans). the mainstream unix market from the early 80s ... was up until then new computer vendors spent huge amount of money on proprietary computer and proprietary operating system. The advent of single chip processors drastically dropped the cost of developing computer system (in workstation and mini market) ... and doing new proprietary operating system became many times larger than doing the hardware. To drop the cost of operating system to compareable to hardware costs ... required adopting portable, relatively off-the-shelf software ... at the time it was unix. one of the things that the workstation group did was spend an enormous amount of money on proprietary "added value" additions to unix ... nearly what would have been spent on doing proprietary operating system from scratch (way out of proportion to what was happening in the workstation & mini market). in the last two decades, the commodity, high-volume, low-margins ... have allowed that business to pretty much overtake the proprietary low-volume, high-margin market. that also accounts for placing the evolving linux base in competition with the corporate proprietary unix offering. -- 42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
