Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!oliveb!sun!basselope!shiffman
From: shiffman%basselope@Sun.COM (Hank Shiffman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Re:IBM did it first
Message-ID: <52434@sun.uucp>
Date: 9 May 88 02:19:56 GMT
References:  <5003@cup.portal.com> <23849@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <3080@pdn.UUCP> <2295@polyslo.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: shiffman@sun.UUCP (Hank Shiffman)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 45

In article <2295@polyslo.UUCP> dorourke@polyslo.UUCP (David O'Rourke) writes:
>In article <3080@pdn.UUCP> alan@pdn.UUCP (0000-Alan Lovejoy) writes:
>>4. If IBM could have successfully sued the clone-makers for violating
>>their "look-and-feel" rights, then a lot of the industry's resources
>>would not have been wasted on IBM-PC technology.  The state of the art
>>today would be far in advance of where it is now.  Sigh.
>
>   Are you equating the IBM PC with "state of the art".   Even when the PC
>was new it was trailing edge tech.  I haven't meet a person yet who will tell
>me they think the PC was a wonderful state of the art machine.  It was 
>old, open, and used off the shelf chips that you could buy at radio shack.

To quote Cool Hand Luke, "what we have here is a failure to
communicate".  David, I fear you've misinterpreted Alan's remarks.  He
never claimed that the IBM PC was state of the art.  He said that the
state of the art would have advanced far more were it not for the PC.

I agree (with both of you).  Most of the work done on the personal
computer side of the industry was constrained for years (and still is)
by the limitations of the most popular computer design of the day, the
IBM PC.  How much might software have advanced if it hadn't been
constrained for so long to 640KB?  What if that popular computer had
supported in its base configuration something better than character
graphics?

The IBM PC was popular in major part due to the IBM name and the
company's image in corporate circles.  As has been said many times
before, no manager ever lost his job for recommending IBM.  By
choosing such a lowest common denominator design for its PC, IBM
created a major bottleneck for software and hardware progress.  How
many articles have been written in recent years that say that a
computer without IBM compatibility doesn't have a chance?

Yeah, IBM slowed the state of the art alright.  In fact, were it not
for the Laserwriter and DTP, the Mac might be a dead issue and the
PS/2 and OS/2 might look a lot more like bigger and faster versions of
the PC and MS-DOS.  Now THERE'S an exciting prospect for an alternate
future!
----
Hank Shiffman					(415) 691-4658
AI Product Marketing
Technical Support				shiffman@Sun.COM
Sun Microsystems, Inc.				...!sun!shiffman

"Anyone who uses the phrase 'easy as taking candy from a baby'
 has never tried taking candy from a baby." -- R. Hood