🚀 go-pugleaf

I think many Freesoft people are hypocrites if they claim Apple is
worse than IBM.  People who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

IBM was the company that invented hardware intimidation.  IBM would
threaten to terminate service contracts if a customer so much as
*looked* at 3rd-party compatible disk drive.  IBM would refuse to sell
mainframes to clone companies.  Other companies had to take IBM to
court in order to get it to release specs on its disk drive interface.

IBM was so bad for the computer industry in the 60's and early 70's
that the government decided to TERMINATE the company by taking it to
court and breaking it up with monopoly and antitrust law.  Talk to
anyone who lived during this period; they'll tell you they wish the
government had succeeded.

It's taken more than a generation for IBM's malignant monopoly to
backfire on the company.  IBM is finally being asked by buyers to
compete on price and performance.  The result is, for the first time
ever, this month IBM showed a quarterly loss.

Was the IBM PC an example of open architecture?  No; the IBM PC was an
example of how the computer giant maneuvers to slow the whole industry
down, so that it doesn't have to compete with itself.  The original
IBM PC could easily have been 400% faster and more versatile, with
clean I/O and no kluges in the video system, and maybe a 68000 with
16Mb address space, but this would have cut into sales of other IBM
products.  The IBM PC was crippleHardwareWare, an example of IBM
laughing at the world, and laughing all the way to the bank.

Don Gillies - gillies@cs.uiuc.edu - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign



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