johnmattson...@gmail.com (John Mattson) writes: > IBM made mistakes back in the 1980's and 1990's from which they may never > really recover. > 1) Doing away with the THINK motto. It seems about the time they did this > is when many of them stopped thinking. > 2) Stopped giving the systems almost free to colleges which stopped the > flow of trained personnel. MS and Apple learned from this mistake. > 3) They almost eliminated VM for heavens sake, and now others have > re-invented it and taken the market. Someone clearly was NOT THINKing. > 4) They invented the PC and did not see the potential in it. It's like > Edison inventing the light bulb, saying "That's nice" and walking away. > Inexcusable.
IBM cut the 50s/60s 40% (or greater) education discount with the 23Jun1969 unbundling announcement in the wake of various legal actions. past unbundling posts http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#unbundle in the early 80s, IBM tried to recover, creating ACIS (academic computing) ... started out with $300M to give away to univ. MIT Project Athena got $25M (Project Athena equally funded by $25M from DEC), X-windows, kerberos, etc. CMU got $50M ... went into MACH, Camelot, some number of others (lots of places would use MACH, including newer Apple operating system). ACIS also sponsors EARN & BITNET (where this mailing list originated) http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#bitnet ... using similar technology used by the internal network (larger than arpanet/internet from just about the beginning until sometime mid-80s) http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#internalnet originally developed by the IBM Cambridge Science Center ... also responsible for virtual machines, inventing GML in 1969 (morphs into SGML a decade later, after another decade morphs into HTML), and some number of other things ... past posts http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#545tech and http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#sgml I've frequently pontificated that early uptake of IBM/PC was 3270 terminal emulation ... IBM/PC with 3270 terminal emulation was about the same price as 3270 terminal ... a large corporation with tens of thousands of 3270s already justified could switch order to IBM/PC with little or no additional business justification effort ... and get single desk footprint that did mainframe terminal and some local computing. http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#terminal my brother was Apple regional marketing rep (largest physical region in CONUS) and would periodic come to town and I would get invited to some business dinners. I got to argue with MAC developers (before MAC was even announced) that it needed terminal emulation (they responded that it was for the kitchen table and would never be contaminated by business uses). Silicon valley was different place back them ... at Hacker's Conference, people could bring unnounced products and be played with by others that worked for competitors. However, communication group didn't track as personal computers become more powerful. I've periodically mentioned that senior disk engineer got a talk scheduled at the annual, internal, world-wide, communication group conference supposedly on 3174 performance ... but opened the talk with the statement that the communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the disk division. The issue was that the communication group had stranglehold on datacenters with corporate strategic responsibility for everything that crossed datacenter walls ... and were strongly fighting off distributed computing and client/server, trying to preserve their dumb terminal (emulation) paradigm and install base. The disk division was seeing the effects of data fleeing the datacenter (to more distributed computing friendly platforms) with drop in disk sales. The disk division had come up with a number of solutions to address the problem, but they were constantly vetoed by the communication group. A few short years later the company goes into the red and was being re-organized into the 13 "baby blues" in preparation for breaking up the company. The board then brings in a new CEO to resurrect the company and reverse the breakup. Starting in the early 80s, I had a project called HSDT ... some past posts http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/subnetwork.html#hsdt with T1 and faster speed links and we were working with director of NSF to connect the NSF supercomputer centers. We were suppose to get $20M, but then congress cuts the budget, some number of other things happen, and then NSF releases a RFP (largely based on what we already had running) but internal politics prevent us from bidding. The NSF director tries to help by writting the company a letter (with support from other agencies), copying the CEO, but that just makes the internal politics worse (as well as the comments that what we already had running was at least 5yrs ahead of all RFP responses). As regional networks connect into the centers it becomes the NSFNET backbone, precursor to the modern internet ... some old email http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#nsfnet in this period the communication was spreading misinformation internally that SNA/VTAM could be used ... somebody collected the misinformation email and forwarded to us ... heavily snipped and redacted to protect the guilty http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/2006w.html#email870109 in this time, they were also spreading misinformation internally that the internal network had to be converted to SNA/VTAM http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/2006x.html#email870302 http://manana.garlic.com/~lynn/2011.html#email870306 -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
