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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (446611)	1/11/2009 1:17:27 AM
From: bentway	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1574505

PC-DOS "IBM had the resources to develop it internally in a very short period of time." This is totally wrong. IBM engineers had no clue how to make an OS that small. The hobbyists were years ahead, which is why IBM did what they did. It's also why they set up an outside group to do the hardware. The PC wasn't regarded as a likely business success by the mainframe guys at IBM. Gates, who had far more vision, gets all the credit for the crappy deal he sold IBM for the OS he bought from another guy for $50k. That had to be the deal of the century.

To: i-node who wrote (446611)	1/11/2009 11:32:45 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574505

"I totally agree. Never suggested otherwise." You sort of did when you stated that IBM did nothing for PC development. "Well, early on this was definitely the case." It still is. Even when something new comes around, like USB, it still looks a lot like something that existed on a mainframe decades ago. In this case, USB looks a lot like a channel processor, but smaller. I/O was abstracted in hardware back in the 1960s. "Make no mistake -- had IBM "known" what they had in the PC, this would never have happened." If they had "known", it wouldn't have become the market it did. IBM likes high profit margins, so a cheap machine would probably start at $1500. And it wouldn't be nearly as powerful because Intel et al would not have had the profits to push x86 as far as it has come. Now, there might have been a commodity computer industry grow up around one of the RISC processors like ARM or MIPS running a unix knockoff like Linux or openBSD, but that might not have happened either.