Re: Apple's ways

[Roy Miller <millers@inebraska.com>]

william strutts wrote:

> "Roy Miller" <millers@inebraska.com> wrote in message
> 3B94ECF4.A4992B97@inebraska.com">news:3B94ECF4.A4992B97@inebraska.com...
> > You have contradicted yourself here, twice!
> >
> > 1) The PS/2 line, from the very beginning included a 386. (While it is
> > true that Compaq had the first 386 PC, it wasn't because IBM failed to
> > recognize the significance of the 386, rather, it has to do with your
> > second self contradiction)
>
> Say what Roy. The Model 30 and the Model 50 were 286 machines
> with Microchannel

The 30 was an ISA 8086. You are thinking of the Model 30 - 286, but it still
had ISA slots.

And do you remember the 55z?

> and the Model 25 was an ISA 286 machine.

The 25 was a two slot 8086. I have several here under my stairs....

> If I
> recall properly the 386 wasn't introduced until the PS/2 model 80 came
> out.

Which was announced the at the same meeting as the 25, 30, and 50. They all
came out the same year, and were announced at the same time. The 80, however,
was intended as a server.

BTW - my local Goodwill store has an 80 for $16.00 - how the mighty have
fallen.

>
>
> > 2) IBM's PS/2 line wasn't software incompatible, but the reason it was
> > hardware incompatible was exactly because it was cutting edge
> > innovation. Read the consumer computer mags of the day, the 3.5" drive
> > was made standard, by IBM, VGA standard by IBM, microchannel, while not
> > a market success, was a recognition that the 16 bit ISA bus was doomed,
> > and LONG before PCI IBM had a fast, clear, 32 bit bus that wasn't a
> > kludge (like EISA, or VESA).
>
> Hardware for the machines was hard to get and expensive since IBM
> had the only viable microchannel machines.

Tandy's machines didn't live? That's what viable means.
Get old PC mag and read the ads for MC cards - plenty of them.

> Most PC makers meaning
> the majority of the market stuck with the ISA architecture.  If it was
> doomed so much then why is microchannel no longer with us?

And why isn't ISA with us? Why is that that we have had EISA, VLB and PCI
slots?

> It didn't
> disappear completely until recently so how bad was ISA then?

ISA was fine, if you didn't mind a 16 bit bottleneck. Not that it mattered
with a modem, but for video cards, or memory cards, or even for Disk I/O
cards people wanted anything but ISA once the 386 caught on, esp after Win
3.0 came out with it's terrible screen refreshing routines.

>
>
> > Apple had cutting edge innovation and slipped from 25% of the market to
> > less than 5%. IBM, to save it's slipping market share, introduced truly
> > cutting edge innovation, and continued to slide. Both lost out to
> > companies that sold PCs that cost much less, and produced similar
> > results. (Apple had 25% of the market with the II and the III, Lisa and
> > Mac were efforts to regain that market share. Both failed, as did the
> > IIgs. IBM had achieved huge market share with the PC and sustained with
> > the XT and the AT Compaq started as a niche (luggable) and grew based on
> > slight edge over IBM [12 vs 10 mhz], high reliability [IBM trademark],
> > and lower price.)
>
> That is because microchannel wasn't exactly what the market wanted.

Sigh. I guess you either don't remember those days, or you don't read very
well. IBM was already slipping in market share. MC was an effort to regain
control of a market it had created by introducing MUCH better hardware AND
having it patented. It didn't work, mostly because other companies came up
with other ways around the bottlenecks, AND by selling machines that had
higher clock rates that MUST  be faster right? (whadda mean that a 10 mhz 286
is faster than a 12 mhz 286??? Or that a 800 mhz PPC is faster than a 1 ghz
P3/4?)

>
> The industry was in a standarization mode

Who created the standard? Who made the 3.5" drive standard on PCs? Who made
VGA standard?

> with the PC architecture with
> the ISA slots and microchannel put IBM on its own little world.

Millions of PS/2s isn't exactly a "little" world.

> The
> majority of the companies

What companies? Most major corps stuck with Big Blue into the very early 90s.

> wanted legacy support which wasn't provided
> by IBM in microchannel.  Who wanted to have to buy a whole new
> computer and new add on boards? Maybe big business did that but I
> will tell you that most small business people and home users didn't.

Ahhh, and that was the reason IBM failed, not MC. That's why IBM went to MC.
People couldn't see that those cute little letters on the box was worth the
premium cost when a Tandy, or a Compaq, or an Uncle Wong's Garage special
cost MUCH less and ran the same software that worked just was well (since, at
that time, most software was still written to work with CGA on an XT!! So a
Laser XT ran the software just fine and cost much less and I'll buy that for
my home office, family computer.

> I
> used to sel PC's at the time and none of my customers wanted microchannel.

Obviously you weren't selling to major corporations.
You were selling to people like me, my first IBM compatible was a Franklin
8000 that I bought in 1987. Two floppy drives, 512K, CGA. It cost me about
$800 at Sears. I later added a 20 meg hard drive, 128K of RAM up grade, and
the clock/calendar chips. My next machine was a Kaypro 16. Same price. Next
was a Laser Turbo XT, and none of them, all bought new, were as good as a
Model 30, but all were considerable cheaper. I didn't give a flying fart one
way or another about ISA vs MC. All I cared about was would it run my
WordPerfect family of programs, and was it cheap enough that I could afford
it.

When I did get to buy a new IBM, it was a PS/1, and again, I didn't care that
it was ISA, as opposed to MC, all I cared about was it was only $800 and it
ran windows.

IBM's big mistake has been the same as Apple's, you don't control the market
with premium priced PCs. Junior the Deformed sold like hotcakes, once IBM
dropped the price. In 1985 you could get a Jr with Jr monitor, 128K and Jr's
terrible thermal printer for about $900. They flew out of the stores! So why
was Jr a failure? Among other reasons, it cost much too much until IBM
decided to clear them out. They could have sold Jr at $900 and made a nice
profit as well as market share. But IBM was greedy. So was Apple in the late
80s. They could have sold the Plus for about half the price after the SE and
II came out, but they kept the price high to milk it for all it was worth.
They didn't care about market share then. Apple is paying for that greed now.

Roy

>
>
> --
> --
> William R. Strutts - wrstrutts1@nospam.home.com - Whatever!
>
> C'est moi!  http://www.facelink.com/wrstrutts
>
> Just hacking away...
>
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