Re: Apple's ways

["william strutts" <wrstrutts1@nospam.home.com>]

"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 and the Model 25 was an ISA 286 machine. If I
recall properly the 386 wasn't introduced until the PS/2 model 80 came
out.

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

> 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.
The industry was in a standarization mode with the PC architecture with
the ISA slots and microchannel put IBM on its own little world. The
majority of the companies 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. I
used to sel PC's at the time and none of my customers wanted microchannel.

--
--
William R. Strutts - wrstrutts1@nospam.home.com - Whatever!

C'est moi!  http://www.facelink.com/wrstrutts

Just hacking away...

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