Phil Payne wrote:
The 1956 consent decree between the Department of Justice and IBM, of Armonk, N.Y., resulted in several restrictions on the company that were designed to prevent it from becoming a monopoly in the computer industry.
There are currently no "Consent Decree" or similar restrictions on IBM. The last was the 1984 EC Undertaking that mainly concerned the timely availability of interface information.
I'm not sure you're correct about that. The 1956 consent decree required IBM to make hardware available for purchase; prior to that all hardware was available on lease only.
In 1968 or 1969, I worked for Applied Data Research, when Marty Goetz decided to sue IBM for giving away free software, to the purported detriment of ISVs (my experience was otherwise - you look at IBM's code, and come up with better, cheaper, and faster solutions). ADR at the time was peddling Roscoe. As part of the consent decree, IBM was "forced" to start charging for software. They also agreed to have their sales staff market Roscoe as well as CRBE, but to my knowledge nothing ever came of that.
Gerhard Postpischil Bradford, VT ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
