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To: Alan Buckley who wrote (16902)	1/30/1998 8:43:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

>>>IBM was harassed certainly, but the government eventually dropped the anti-trust suit...since the free market had already taken away IBMs monopoly.<<< I agree with much of the rest of what you said, but this is inaccurate. First of all, the government forced IBM to stop punishing clients that hooked up 3 party peripherals to IBMs plugs. They also forced them to publish the specs for those plugs, and stabilize the specs, and license the patents required to use those specs. Second, they forced them to spin off part of the original peripherals business. It's been a very long time, but I think CDC or some other outfit had its start as that spinoff. Third, they forced them to license the 360 OS to other manufacturers. Thus the Ahmdahl and Fujitsu mainframe competition to IBM 360 was started by this government action. The court supervised IBMs anticompetitive posture for decades, and made many detail instructions during that time. To a great extent, it was this that created the opening for the companies that became the 'Seven Dwarves', the competitors in the minicomputer business that later opened up possibilities for UNIX, Intel, and Microsoft to exist and prosper. Without this successful antitrust action by the government the computer business as we know it today would not exist. We would still be getting fed mainframe timeslices at dollars per processor minute. What the government finally did was put closure to that case because they had accomplished what needed to be done, largely. They had created a competitive atmosphere in a situation where previously one company had had 90% of the business. I used to live in the IBM universe. Now I live in the Microsoft universe, but I've seen this movie before. Sooner or later, the Empire always crumbles. It's just a matter of time. Chaz