We were considering buying a pair of 386 PS2's from IBM back then. We wound up getting clones for half the price. They stood no chance the way that market mutated and evolved so rapidly.
@ No, an XT Clone. I’ve seen S-100 bus computers, they were still in use but never an Altair. FYI, look up the S100 Bus song by Frank Hayes. What a nightmare, the PC bus was better.
@@waynesworldofsci-tech I meant Atari, I forget how to spell the name, it's been over 3 decades ago. I bought an Atari PC-XT compatible (aka clone) in 1988 or 1989, it was excellent (for the time). The main computer was separate from the hard-disk, each in a beige color box. I went to the main public library in Vancouver, Canada to get free SIG (Special Interest Group) software, it had a designated computer with a CD-ROM full of SIG software (amazing service in a public library in that era) I went with my floppies to copy those free software. That was when most people didn't have computers.
And we can see it again with ARM Architecture. One time how to do it right (Apple) and one time how not to do it (Microsoft). I'm not a fan of Apple anymore, but there ARM-Strategy for Macs is absolutely right.
Yes and no. OS/2 had excellent legacy compatibility, and much much much better backwards compatibility than Win NT. It could run the original 1993 Doom with just a few tweaks, windowed or full screen if I recall correctly. Backwards compatibility was an IBM value since system 360 at least. It was very bloated, slow and resource hungry too. I'm not defending it. And who won the war? Best wishes.
@@jeha4489 Apple was already forcing developers to get in line with developing for 64-bit only and deprecating OpenGL with MacOS Catalina in preparation for the ARM transition. Microsoft doesn't have that luxury of bossing around all of their developers to move on from older standards when Windows' entire shtick is backwards compatibility all the way back to Windows 2000.
Great, accurate video. I worked at IBM as a chip designer at the time, and was angry about how hard it was to design a MicroChannel interface, even with the technology available at the company. It was probably designed like that on purpose, to raise the bar for small newcomers. As the video correctly stated, MCA was faster, but there was no demand for that speed back then. MCA had a great advantage that could be a selling point, but wasn't milked enough: it was truly plug and play. At the time adding a new ISA expansion card could be a nightmare, with interrupt and DMA clashes between boards, having to flip DIP switches until they were gone.
ISA eventually got plug and play (a.k.a. plug and pray since there was no guarantee that it would actually work and you wouldn't have to go in and do things manually anyhow).
A $5,000 computer in 1984 would cost $13,000 today!!! People don't realize how special and rare computers were all through the 80's, you were lucky if the company you worked at could afford multiple computers!
They were rare, I grew up in the 80s and I really don't remember ever seeing one in person, or personally knowing someone who owned one... pretty sure that during the 80s I only saw PCs in TV shows But that's probably because I lived in Europe and not USA, so that made it a bit harder given that we're talking mostly about US companies here and the early days of the "affordable" PC for the masses.
@@mike04574 Iberian Peninsula, nearby an urban area of over 1 million people... and I really don't remember seeing a computer working in person while growing through the 80s! Maybe it's because I was a kid and didn't pay much interest into it. Banks and other places probably had them, but it's not the kind of place kids dwell in! And none of the people I grew up with in the 80s (friends, neighbors, and even family members) ever talked about anything computer related. Computer stores selling PCs were also quite scarce, because I also don't remember ever seeing one in my city!! For me, computers really only started appearing everywhere (even being sold in hypermarkets) with the advent of the Pentium & Windows 3.1 era... and DOOM!! Up until that time, I only cared and paid attention to consoles and the arcade machines in my local "cafés"!!!
@@mike04574 Also, I do know that the TV show "Computer Chronicles" was quite popular in the 80s, but I also don't remember ever seeing one episode being aired in any of national TV channels of the time! Had I been exposed to such content as a kid in the 80s, I would probably have paid more attention to PCs as a kid...
Great nostalgia for me. In 1984 I was in the USMC and part of ZDS’s contract to sell clones to the military included offering them to all military personnel at 50% off. I borrowed $2500 ($7500 in today’s money) from my mother to get one. It had two 5.25” floppies, no hard drive, and CGA graphics. You could read the file names as they slowly scrolled by on a DIR command. Demand was so high that I didn’t receive it until a month after I left the corps. As an electronics technician, after leaving the military, most companies I worked for didn’t even have a PC in the company at the time, so I had a great head start. I taught myself assembly and FORTRAN and wrote programs to help at work. It wasn’t until 1992 that I started my first job where I actually had a computer on my desk at work. It was a lot of fun over the years riding the wave of upgrades as technology improved. Great video!
Great story!. I was a nerd kid in the late 90's, the PC scene at the time was Wild, my Dad bought the first family PC in 98 and about two years later the hard disk and memory were too small for me 😂, not good news for my Dad who doesn't understand why he had to spend more money on upgrades.
In 1987, I saw my first PC with an actual installed hard drive. It had the slot filled up where you loaded the software and it had a red dot light that was on. I remember asking what is that device? That is an actual hard drive. I was impressed.
The big problem with OS/2 on the '286 wasn't that it was getting "too big", but rather DOS compatibility. The '286 was designed to boot in real mode and move to "protect" mode and never look back. There's no instruction to move back to real mode! There is _nothing_ like a virtual real mode that still keeps the protected-mode OS in control. So, we had the "penalty box". You could have exactly 1 DOS session, which could not be windowed and, IIRC, stopped all multi-tasking -- the entire OS/2 system was pushed aside while it ran DOS in (actual) real mode. Oh, and that DOS-in-OS/2 could not see the long file names at all. In order to return to real mode, the CPU was reset. It used the keyboard's 8042 microcontroller to toggle the reset line. The BIOS noticed it was a soft reset in this context and skipped the POST etc. and assumed everything was already loaded into memory and just started at a standard address.
@@lucasrem Indeed, as a DOS developer, I found it to be the best version of DOS ever! It could run multiple sessions and even using bare-metal graphics, forcing it to run full-screen, multi-tasking continued.
There I was 1979 at the beginning of the computer revolution. I sold 6 TRS-80s in one month . October, I believe. I worked for Radio Shack. Those were the days heady...
I was a tech for IBM in the early 2000s and even then with the PCI bus THE standard, windows being shipped on 99% of IBM's own PCs, internally, the "superiority of microchanel and os/2 hype was still being hammered in to us hard. They made a mistake, they knew it, they didn't budge, and literally held the wheel while they drove the IBM PC business into the ground. Also, there was an article on Vice a few years ago about OS/2' still running on the NYC subway system and how it's basically preventing them from being able to add new payment methods that were popping up. Meaning they took all the customers they could along for the freefall ride.
The problem was wordperfect was the most dangerous program conceivable. If you mistyped something after a special character, the whole document was obliterated, no cloud save, that was NEO GEO, you just opened a whole can full of whoop ass. Each and every time, why didn't they make Neo Geo? But if you had a Mac, this is fantastically impossible, the best you could do is rewrite *_OOHH GATES OHHH JOBS_* in the Word hexeditor
It's interesting how IBM in It's attempt to milk the PC followed the same strategy as AT&T did with UNIX. You'd think senior management at IBM would at least be aware of how that attempt played out.
I mean, AT&T sort of pulled it off in terms of institutional sales until the NT kernel was halfway decent, they had gotten HP and IBM to buy into the system. IBM was merely trying to repeat what they had done - except that HP made their own machines and AT&T was about to be broken up and kneecapped. It was bad timing for an otherwise beautifully evil plan.
IBM is to PCs, as Kodak is to digital cameras! Both companies in the 1980s were innovators in breakthrough technology, but their management underestimated competitors and refused to listen to consumer demands! Although Compaq has been absorbed by HP, while Microsoft is bigger than ever, because they were able to adapt and diversify their business!
I worked for Motorola during this time. This post also describes Motorola in cellphones. "Customers do not need LCD displays, they do not care about battery life".
IBM 62 BILLION in revenue last year…. They bailed and stuck with what they knew Best stock I ever bought.. great dividend… still growing … Hardly a failure
@@g.t.richardson6311 IBM isn’t a failed company, but they aren’t as big as they once were, they let Microsoft and Apple take over the home computer business.
@@Markimark151 yes that is the point I was trying to make… most of the comments on here act like they are out of business It is my number one stock in unrealized gain Tripled my money…. In addition, it pays me a nice dividend every three months., very nice. Maybe I’m confused. I didn’t know Microsoft made home computers, yes, I know they make software. And there are still plenty of people who don’t use Apple computers.
The sheer hubris and arrogance of IBM and the proprietary Micro-Channel Bus. I remember very well those early '80's. I was working for Data General Corporation whose minicomputers were still selling well then, but by the mid '90's that was to end in a sad, quiet collapse. Wang/Prime/DEC. Poof. Gone.
We called it "the BS/2" back in its day. IBM was obviously trying to make everything else obsolete, and have nothing that already existed work with it. They even made the PS/2 computer cases too narrow for the then-ubiquitous 5.25" floppies. 3.5" or bust. Of course, startups like the company I worked for at the time would have none of that.
AT&T (and most of the so-called "Baby Bells) had, and still has, the same failing. Too bad, maybe? Which makes AT&T's attempts at getting into businesses such as entertainment content and bank cards even more laughable: they have very few transferable management skills and since divestiture, a true lack of institutional self-awareness. Oh well.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@gus473 Very true and agreed very entertaining. Had a friend working at AT&T and showed them how to save a lot of time and money, even developed the system on his own time. He was fired the next day.
For decades there was IBM and the riff raff, God and commoners. Also all systems were proprietary even if custom outside components were used, and it wasn't until the pc that components were standardized and Intel blew up.
@@jyy9624 In the 1960s, someone in the press described the US computer sector as "IBM and the seven dwarfs". IBM had over 65% of the entire computer base in the country. Over time, it became more like "IBM and the seven million munchkins" (per Stan Kelley) because computers became so much cheaper and also needed to do work. Eventually, it seems IBM wanted to work like the world was still the early 60s, but the customers and their competitors were working around IBM.
Funny you say that one needed a shopping cart to carry around the Compaq portable. I used to work programming industrial controllers in the 80s and we used one of those PCs, and carried it in a cart. It was not a shopping cart tough but a quite robust one with large wheels and a wood base. Due to safety reasons, we only worked in pairs. My colleague at the time was studying for entrance in an university and those programming sessions could take hours but it was a one-man job so we had a deal: he would carry around the cart with the PC and tools, mount, dismount and clean it all and I would do all the programming while he use the time to study. This arrangement worked quite well for us both :)
adilsongoliveira The Compaq i found was CRT in the case too, portable ? heavy box, way bigger than the 1980 cel phones ! It did VGA on monochrome, but good enough to run all !
This is part of the personal computer lore presented in the book Accidental Empires by Robert Cringley, and the subsequent documentary Triumph of the Nerds, back in the early 1990s. Yes, IBM's big mistake, was hesitating to go to the 386. Where I worked, at the time, we had IBM Technical Reference Manual. Used it mostly for referencing the hardware, so to make plug in cards. The BIOS source listing was an appendix in that manual. 29:08 - Love that, that picture also has the older 8" Floppy. That's why it got its name, because the 8" was really floppy !
I bought a Columbia must be 40 years ago now. Great machine at the time, upgraded it with a 5MB HDD eventually. The sound produced when my programs accessed the hard disk was very satisfying. I worked for a shop writing BASIC programs and remember when we got our first Compaq portable. Very impressive, I was wowed with the graphics capability and the jazzy ray trace of the Compaq logo when the machine booted.
All the sounds at the time were a large part of the experience. Floppy grinding, various beeps and peeps, flyback transformer hum, fan shushing, Winchester sizzle, modem dialing, and when things went wrong! All silent now.
In those days, startup investment was counted in million with single-digit or fraction of it. Now it's always triple-digits or otherwise not worthy of being reported in the news. Some AI startups were fed several billions without any prospect of a profit within 5 years. Go figure!
Good video. I am old enough to remember most of this even though I was a teenager in the 80s. regarding MCA, IBM, a name which had far more power and influence than is conceivable today, copyrighted everything to control it. And it wasn't long before they were begging people to make versions of their own. Nobody did. The original problem for IBM was, they made a wonderful new PC platform, except that the two parts that made all the money and had all the control, the microprocessor and the operating system, they didn't control. Other companies did. In the late 80s and following the clone makers went crazy. It was an awesome time to be a consumer.
I remember as a kid being very underwhelmed when the PS/2 line came out, thinking that they came out with something worse than before, with blatant lock in, and it costs way more money than the competition too! Uh.. no. And the Mac and Amiga were there, pointing the way to the future, even if Commodore itself, later self-destructed.
@ well, they were expensive as you might expect. However the MCA did have several advantages, which we would see later in competing architectures. first, the slot was physically smaller. But more important, the system automatically assigned interrupts. If you've ever tried to resolve an interrupt conflict manually you know how on pleasant that can be.
I was there in 82 working at IBM FSB Gathersburg MD. While IBMs competition was innovating, IBM was pushing Microchannel junk that was far behind the day it was announced. They tried to lock in the market, as opposed to making a better product
The government company my wife worked for purchased lots and lots of IBM PS/2 Model 80. They paid AUD $24,000 each. ( about USD $16,500 ). They each came with micro-channel bus 3270 adaptor cards, so each Model 80 could still connect to their Mainframe in Melbourne. For comparison, Olivetti 386DX computers were around AUD $4,000 at the time. ( BUT WITHOUT 3270 emulator cards, of course ) .
39:00 I was thinking about the same thing. AT&T lost the Unix market because of their license fees. I was inside IBM at the time developing their AIX watching them tell AT&T no and thus was born OSF (which was a miserable failure but the egg had been splattered).
The video title alone is clickbait. But of the (unfortunately rare) good kind! The history of technology videos you make continue to be of the highest quality and are exceedingly well-researched. I appreciate your diligence and efforts in everything you do, particularly in this area.
And the 3.5" floppy stays with us today as the save icon. Which does make one wonder, How long will it be the save icon. I have not had a PC with an FDD in ages, I do remember having one with both 5.25 and 3.5.
The rumor at the time is that IBM corporate doubted Microsoft had good title to PC-DOS, and stayed as far away from an exclusive agreement to limit liability.
@@erictayet I lived in San Jose at the time, and had some customers who were in the industry. A fair number had low opinions of Bill Gates’ business ethics.
Excellent overview. Another issue is that when IBM introduced the ps/2 there was a 286 machine running ISA and the clones were running chips at a faster clock rate more often than not. Channels also keep pushing clones on people asking for IBM.
Love the fact that a lot of the images have the Model M keyboard, which didn't appear until the PS/2. I'm typing this on a nearly-40-year-old Model M which is still going strong. At least on of the images has the rare tenkeyless Model M; you don't wanna know what those sell for on eBay. Yes, I'm a keyboard geek.
Yep me too, the only part of a real PC i have left, a ps2 original model m keyboard. I keep buying mechanical keyboards to replace it but they have yet to do so. Please someone replicate the buckling spring switch.
@@anticat900 The closest thing on the market now is probably Unicomp's New Model M buckling-spring keyboards; I'm typing this right now on one. But even they aren't going to be _exactly_ the same as original IBM or Lexmark Model Ms, I'd imagine.
Meower68 we bought the old German Cherry keyboards back then, din was all they did. needed PS/2, still have them here. Germany, many thanks, your product manager !!!
A great channel that makes hollywood movie lenght quality videos on this exact topic is named (counter intuitively) "Another Boring Topic". They sadly only post new videos a few times each year. But the wait is worth it. Multi Hour long content on the history of OS2, Windows, Office, 3D Software, ect..
I worked at IBM on OS/2. My first PC was an XT. Then a PS/2 model 70, then a model 80 (85? it was a 486) then a model 90. I wish I still had those computers, even as display pieces, even though it took almost a miracle to find a microchannel sound card. IBM made such dumb decisions in retrospective; they were trying to apply the model that had worked for them in other markets to the PC space without realizing that the PC space was so different - they couldn't see it. Those moments are ALWAYS opportunities for those who have the vision.
My dad was selling non-brand PC clone in Hong Kong to China. Motherboard from Taiwan, CPU and graphics card from US, RAM from Japan or later Korea. The Chinese customer will ask my Dad to find some fake IBM box and user manual and resell them in China as real IBM. It was a good day back then.
I'm sorry, but the idea of IBM's PC DOS being a modified MS-DOS is completely backwards. Microsoft bought Seattle Computer Products CP/M clone, 86-DOS (also known as QDOS) in order to fulfil the contract Microsoft signed with IBM to provide an OS. Microsoft retained the rights to this OS, including rights to redistribute it, and sold it to other vendors (notably, but not exclusively, to DEC for the Rainbow 100). Therefore, MS-DOS was more a derivative of PC-DOS, and not the other way round, as you imply
Microsoft bought 86dos under the instruction of IBM and then modified it to meet IBMs specifications. Bill Gates suggested IBM buy 86dos themselves, IBM said no. He asked if he could sell it to anyone else, IBM said yes. IBM were crazy
Great video but a small disappointment was not mentioning the Turbo button on early PCs. I just learned that it had a purpose: some software used the CPU as a timer assuming the speed of the original PC but newer computers running faster made some games unplayable so non-turbo mode put the computer back to original PC speed. As for the 386, I joined a company in 1991 that bought one and had 16 terminals running off it because it was so powerful by the standards of the day. Also, does the HP-150 at 10:32 remind anyone else of the original Mac which came out a little later?
The "partly pregnant" comment was no doubt a nod to the "Mythical Man-Month" concept coined by Fred Brooks, an architect at IBM. The idea is that a project is like a pregnancy-you can't get a baby in 1 month just by adding 9 women!
You left off the IBM Portable PC. I used one at IBM Semiconductor to monitor plasma emissions for etch endpoint detection. It was a beast that needed a cart to move around the lab. I never saw one outside the building.
My dad was assigned one of those - he was working for an insurance company. He took it with him on one trip and never again. I ended up adopting it. Fond memories, my first exposure to a 'real' computer.
jaykita2069 The 1983 IBM Plasma screen, it was touche too, we did have them here too ! a close to the government related library system. monochrome !!!
10:54 My advisor in college told me about his first computer, an Osborne 1. There was a clock in the disk (or maybe tape?) drive that was not stable over temperature, so if the machine was cold it could not read back data that was written while hot and vice versa. He had to write down how long the machine was on (as a proxy for temperature) when writing data so it could be read back correctly.
I took a nerdy pilgrimage tour earlier this year to the Vintage Computer Festival SouthWest in Dallas, followed by the Computer Histroy Museum in Mountain View. Got good vibes seeing so much history on display again in this video
In the mid 90s, someone in my apartment complex threw away a perfectly good IBM XT PC with a green phosphor screen and several boxes of 5 1/4" floppies. I went dumpster diving and hauled out the computer. I was a nerd back then and even had subscriptions to Computer Shopper magazine and Software of the Month Club. When I got the IBM disassembled, cleaned, re-assembled, I played the included games, ran some diagnostics I had, and blessed the IBM as "clean." I listed the IBM XT with its green screen and boxes of disks in the classified ads and sold the lot the same day the classified print hit the stands.
Fun trip down memory lane. My first PC was a no-name XT clone "souped" up with a NEC V20 CPU in the late 1980s. Then in the 90s worked at NEC Technologies and DEC developing PCs. I was a big fan of EISA until Intel killed it with PCI. Absolutely agree it was IBM's greed to lock things down with the PS/2 that doomed their PC biz.
@tomschmidt381 I'm surprised NEC never ended up with a x86 cross licencing deal with intel & AMD . NEC had a lot of potential to be like the big trillion dollar American tech companies or Samsung as far as I'm concerned. Made their own x86 CPUs as you mentioned, did well in the Japanese computer market with the NEC 88/98 , turbo grafx/PC FX video game consoles(plus MIPs CPU licence for n64 CPU & Dreamcast power VR GPU plus GPUs for PCs in the late 90s early00s), fax machines in the 80s n 90s.
@@cryptocsguy9282 NEC also had a fantastic CRT display group that we worked with so NEC was well positioned in the PC space in the US and as you mentioned NEC dominated the Japanese market.
Just for future reference, the American company known as Zenith is properly pronounced "ZEEnith". Here in the U.S. we say it that way. I don't know why. Great story! I'd gotten the basics of it from an old documentary called "Triumph of the Nerds" but you went into way greater detail and I appreciate it very much!
During the 1990s, the company I worked for developed Win 3.1 GUI programs on IBM OS/2. The reason was the customer originally wanted OS/2 PM programs but then decided they preferred Win 3.1 GUI. The GUI windows code is somewhat similar between OS/2 PM and Win 3.1. I remember it was very pleasant developing and testing the Win 3.1 programs on OS/2.
I worked in Computer field service back then. It was apparent the IBM was trying to do what they always did. Sell business machines at businesses at a premium. They originally had to intentions of selling directly to consumers. Consumers could afford what they wanted to sell.
It reminds me of my IBM PC XT in 1984. 1) The IBM PC XT consisted of two boxes: the CPU unit and the hard disk unit. 2) The system performed a POST (Power-On Self-Test) to check each memory location one by one, which took a long time. 3) The keyboard was famously noisy (buckling spring mechanism)
You are mistaken. The XT never came in two boxes, and the model with two boxes you are thinking of was an IBM mainframe terminal or 3270 emulator. I can't remember the details now; it was 40 years ago.
@@DumbledoreMcCracken Mea culpa! I was unaware that there were also IBM XTs with only one unit. Apparently, the IBM 5161 Expansion Unit was optional. From Wikipedia: The 5161 is an expansion chassis using an identical case and power supply to the XT, but instead of a system board, provides a backplane with eight card slots. It connects to the main system unit using an Extender Card in the system unit and a Receiver Card in the Expansion Unit, connected by a custom cable.[3] The 5161 shipped with a 10 MB hard drive, and had room for a second one.
Excellent summary. I lived this and worked in the PC industry during this time frame. My one regret is that I didn't work for any major supplier at the time so I wasn't involved in any of the key decision making. 🤔
the Apple II wasn't a big success at the start though, the Apple ][ sold 10,000 in 2 years, and then 40,000 of the Apple ][+ meanwhile the TRS-80 and Commodore P.E.T where doing over 100,000. Then the VIC-20 turned up, and left the rest in its dust only for the 64 to show and leave everything in its dust. The Apple //e did well with Visicalc and then schools. After that the only other model to sell well was the IIgs which hit a million, again popular with schools. The Commodore 128 sold about the same amount as all of the Apple 8bits in 4 years as Apple sold from the 78 to 94. The Commodore 128 is called a failure by most people.
So great!!! I love the chip and fab focus, but I REALLY like how you expand out. Im old and I lived this! Haha. I haven’t heard the term Micro Channel in decades. 😂
It's not much history, but the history of computing hardware and dominance in the space seems to repeatedly show that the dominant one misses the boat on a format and paradigm change. IBM missed the boat on the PC when mainframes were being overtaken and computing was decentralized. Intel missed the boat on small, energy efficient, low-power processors in mobile devices that overtook the PC, further decentralizing computing and offloading heavy tasks from local computation to networked heavier lifting. And then those producers who did well in the mobile space like Qualcomm and ARM never had time to establish a single dominant player, because everyone other than Nvidia and AMD missed the boat on GPU architecture to feed cloud computing and now AI computing demand. I wonder what the future will look like if the trend in shrinking and decentralizing continues.
Microchannel was a solution looking for a problem. The only thing requiring that performance was the graphics subsystem. The clones solved that single problem with the vesa bus closely connected to the processor. Later of course, PCI solved the overall problem supporting graphics and all the newer performance demands.
6:25 I was a freshman in college. An accounting professor went on for ten minutes about how we had no idea how hard the world had just flipped upside down, and we should all get an IBM PC right away. I thought "pfffbt, a very expensive game machine". Now I work in a dev lab for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The world moves quickly alright.
bro dude.. what bothers me deeply is that tech channels sell VPNs as a "security enhancement" when really it only is for unencrypted traffic which is literally nowhere to be found anymore. SSL is a big enough security feature, also discarding MITM attacks and encrypting web traffic. there is only one benefit of a vpn and that is that you can pirate stuff without showing off your ip. but please stop selling this as a security tool. it is really not since you just shift trust from an isp to a vpn provider.
Nothing is truly encrypted for the public, but it's better than nothing. Honestly, we lost the battle on data encryption being the standard a long time ago when Microsoft held the reins with the likes of Google and TH-cam. They are way too strong now and the wider world accepts that their data getting sold off is just the cost of using the internet.
@@Jin-1337 yes. it is all about trusted CAs. and those cannot be truly reliable since political interests are interfering and dictating on those certificates - since they are trust-based like everything in life. but it helps protecting anyone from random creeps.
In 1982, Big Blue saved the world from Apple dominance in the PC market by opening their hardware design. Apple responded with their 1984 ad, painting openness as oppression.
I started working in a PC dealerships in the early 80s and saw these changes first hand , it was a wild scary ride , it seemed every week there seemed to be a new Compaq PC or a new software release to master , being young and with ties it was wonderful. I ended up working for one of my customers using an IBM PS/" Model 70 with OS/2 on it .. Ah well we all make mistakes!
In Brazil, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, people generally bought American Apple Plus computers and national computers manufactured by Prologica, Scopus and Itautec. My first computer was a legendary Prologica Solution 16, a very reliable machine that had two floppy disk slots. I made a lot of money with this machine for about 3 years until I bought a PC with a hard drive.
IBM refused to price anything that a consumer could not get cheaper elsewhere and made thier stuff proprietary which no-one wanted. They really shot themself in the foot with OS2 by pricing it at eye watering levels with no software to run on it!
"Big Blue's balance sheet is in decent shape. Exiting Q2, total assets stood at $133.8 billion, with $12.2 billion of that in cash and equivalents. Its Q2 total liabilities were $109.7 billion, including $56.5 billion in debt. Oct 10, 2024"
@@MrHav1knot really sure if you’re saying Microsoft is doing bad because it’s not. They just made half of what IBM made in an entire year in a single quarter.
Long time watcher, is this the first sponsorship? I can’t remember the last time it wasn’t funded by the patron. Not a complaint just a honest question. Keep up the good work
I worked on OS/2 networking for a while, for a contractor on the IBM side. Basically every dumb feature requested by any senior IBM salesman had to be incorporated, while Microsoft just laughed and kept their version of OS/2 clean.
Not mentioned was that as IBM had done most of the research for OS/2 and Microsoft did most of the coding, Microsoft began to develop a new operating system, Windows NT, that was remarkably similar to OS/2. It wasn't identical, yet it borrowed many of the ideas IBM was trying to incorporate into OS/2. So, Microsoft benefitted form the research done by IBM and done with IBM money. The great salesman run behemoth of IBM was steamrolled by a nerd!
The stillborn final version of OS/2, OS/2 for PowerPC, was developed collaboratively by IBM Boca, OSF/RI, and DEC's Embedded and Real-Time Business Unit. It differed dramatically from previous OS/2's and from Windows NT.
Sorry, but most observers, including well known Prof/Dr Tannembaum, agree that OS/2 was inspired by MULTICS, meanwhile Win-NT was inspired by DEC's VMS, via Dave Cutler
@@williamyf Sorry, NT was created during and after OS/2 -- no way the concepts that IBM provided managed to make it into NT happened without knowingly doing so!
@@williamyf OS/2 for PowerPC was not inspired by MULTICS. It was an OS/2 version inspired by the OSF/MK variant of OSF/1, which had a version of the UNIX personality.
As a software developer I tried to code for OS/2, but it was such an expensive hassle to buy the required IBM C compiler and SDK that I gave up. Microsoft C sold for a fraction of the price, and the Windows SDK was free. It was a no brainer which to choose.
My first pc, a PC clone I was so proud of. A 386 that froze if I stopped working (Word Perfect) so it was save save save and reboots as needed. Loved it though. Richard Feynman was right about just playing with a computer. It is addictive and time can just go away. So long.
Good documentary. Thank you! One bone to pick, though: "... M$ released wind0$e 3.0 - The first two iterations [of wind0$e] were awful". -> Implying that wind0$e 3.0 was good? - Sorry mate, _any_ wind0$e prior to Win95 was and still is outright awful! Any PC I had to use back then where I was confronted with the wind0$e clown-suit on top of DOS resulted in me immediately exiting to the DOS prompt and carrying on from there! 😂 Win95 was a significant improvement, but ultimately painful enough that I persisted with the then obsolescent Amiga at home until the Mac G4 came out. In relative terms, Wn98 and XP were OK (just) and NT was alright for server stuff, but really, M$ hadn't had particularly good OSes between [M$] DOS6.22 and until Win7 came along, which was actually pretty good. Win10, _sans_ telemetry is not bad, but we're going downhill again with Win11.
Eventually IBM would even produce 486 and Pentium based PC clones based on the Industry standards not their own proprietary ones. It is surprising how many of IBM's partners would end up working with the clone Industry to develop industry standards.The PS/2 would be a fatal mistake but when cloners realised they could compete on price and performance (such as Turbo XT clones), IBM had already lost. Highly integrated VLSI AT chipsets started a race to the bottom for price eventually leading to Single Chip AT Chipsets. It sure made it cheaper to make a motherboard when you can go from dozens of through hole ICs to a single surface mount ASIC. The AT was a fantastic computer but by then it was too late, the clone Market was way too Mature. The AT being so good is why our Modern PCs are still partially AT compatible. Its taking a very long time for the industry to finally say we can completely drop AT compatibility. It will be the end of a long era when we can no longer boot to MS-DOS on any new computer. The Industry as a whole is very adverse to breaking that Magic Backwards Compatibility that won them the war in the first place.
Publishing the BIOS source code was an epic decision --- it taught an entire generation of kids how the thing worked --- maybe IBM was prophetic in thinking this was a small product in a small market. It was an egg.
tomholroyd7519 We did needed a EU system, running 100% IBM compatible. THe EU laws gave us the freedom, Phoenix produced it ! Tulip Computers did it, close connections to the governments in Europe made it 100% legal Phoenix !
Before the PS2 line there was a saying in the business world that no one had ever been fired for buying an IBM. That saying vanished after the PS2 line came out, people did get fired for buying those. Most of the old software didn't run on them, and most of the older hardware did work. Looking back on it, the PS2 line really was a delusional choice from IBM at the time.
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boo this
I used to use them but they don’t support port forwarding. But they were good while I had them.
By refusing to race to the bottom... That's how
Will nordvpn allow me to go on facebook in China?
We were considering buying a pair of 386 PS2's from IBM back then. We wound up getting clones for half the price. They stood no chance the way that market mutated and evolved so rapidly.
Heh. My first work computer was a 4.7 mhz pc-xt beige box clone.
@@waynesworldofsci-tech
Atari?
@
No, an XT Clone. I’ve seen S-100 bus computers, they were still in use but never an Altair.
FYI, look up the S100 Bus song by Frank Hayes. What a nightmare, the PC bus was better.
@@waynesworldofsci-tech
I meant Atari, I forget how to spell the name, it's been over 3 decades ago. I bought an Atari PC-XT compatible (aka clone) in 1988 or 1989, it was excellent (for the time). The main computer was separate from the hard-disk, each in a beige color box. I went to the main public library in Vancouver, Canada to get free SIG (Special Interest Group) software, it had a designated computer with a CD-ROM full of SIG software (amazing service in a public library in that era) I went with my floppies to copy those free software. That was when most people didn't have computers.
@
I miss the SIGs.
Lesson 1: Backward Compatibility.
Lesson 2: Backward Compatibility.
Lesson 3: Backward Compatibility.
And when Itanium later was brought out, that lesson was forgotten. And thus was born X64.
And we can see it again with ARM Architecture. One time how to do it right (Apple) and one time how not to do it (Microsoft).
I'm not a fan of Apple anymore, but there ARM-Strategy for Macs is absolutely right.
Yes and no.
OS/2 had excellent legacy compatibility, and much much much better backwards compatibility than Win NT.
It could run the original 1993 Doom with just a few tweaks, windowed or full screen if I recall correctly.
Backwards compatibility was an IBM value since system 360 at least.
It was very bloated, slow and resource hungry too. I'm not defending it.
And who won the war?
Best wishes.
@@jeha4489 Apple was already forcing developers to get in line with developing for 64-bit only and deprecating OpenGL with MacOS Catalina in preparation for the ARM transition.
Microsoft doesn't have that luxury of bossing around all of their developers to move on from older standards when Windows' entire shtick is backwards compatibility all the way back to Windows 2000.
@@fujinshu My comment based on what happened with the Qualcomm Devkit. It came to late and had never all function
Great, accurate video. I worked at IBM as a chip designer at the time, and was angry about how hard it was to design a MicroChannel interface, even with the technology available at the company. It was probably designed like that on purpose, to raise the bar for small newcomers. As the video correctly stated, MCA was faster, but there was no demand for that speed back then. MCA had a great advantage that could be a selling point, but wasn't milked enough: it was truly plug and play. At the time adding a new ISA expansion card could be a nightmare, with interrupt and DMA clashes between boards, having to flip DIP switches until they were gone.
That configuration nightmare was part of the fun for the home user. Now the gnulinux dweebs have a lock on nightmare configuration issues.
Wait a second, so MCA was PCI before PCI was PCI?
@jure4835 in which sense, being plug and play or being hard to design? I don't know much about PCI, but at least it has a clock, doesn't it?
@@bearcb It was faster than ISA and was Plug'n'Play.
ISA eventually got plug and play (a.k.a. plug and pray since there was no guarantee that it would actually work and you wouldn't have to go in and do things manually anyhow).
A $5,000 computer in 1984 would cost $13,000 today!!! People don't realize how special and rare computers were all through the 80's, you were lucky if the company you worked at could afford multiple computers!
They were rare, I grew up in the 80s and I really don't remember ever seeing one in person, or personally knowing someone who owned one... pretty sure that during the 80s I only saw PCs in TV shows
But that's probably because I lived in Europe and not USA, so that made it a bit harder given that we're talking mostly about US companies here and the early days of the "affordable" PC for the masses.
Home computers were cheaper tho like the commodore. Pretty popular here where I lived in the Uk in the 80s
@@you2be839where did you live in Europe?
@@mike04574 Iberian Peninsula, nearby an urban area of over 1 million people... and I really don't remember seeing a computer working in person while growing through the 80s!
Maybe it's because I was a kid and didn't pay much interest into it.
Banks and other places probably had them, but it's not the kind of place kids dwell in!
And none of the people I grew up with in the 80s (friends, neighbors, and even family members) ever talked about anything computer related.
Computer stores selling PCs were also quite scarce, because I also don't remember ever seeing one in my city!!
For me, computers really only started appearing everywhere (even being sold in hypermarkets) with the advent of the Pentium & Windows 3.1 era... and DOOM!!
Up until that time, I only cared and paid attention to consoles and the arcade machines in my local "cafés"!!!
@@mike04574 Also, I do know that the TV show "Computer Chronicles" was quite popular in the 80s, but I also don't remember ever seeing one episode being aired in any of national TV channels of the time!
Had I been exposed to such content as a kid in the 80s, I would probably have paid more attention to PCs as a kid...
Great nostalgia for me. In 1984 I was in the USMC and part of ZDS’s contract to sell clones to the military included offering them to all military personnel at 50% off. I borrowed $2500 ($7500 in today’s money) from my mother to get one. It had two 5.25” floppies, no hard drive, and CGA graphics. You could read the file names as they slowly scrolled by on a DIR command. Demand was so high that I didn’t receive it until a month after I left the corps. As an electronics technician, after leaving the military, most companies I worked for didn’t even have a PC in the company at the time, so I had a great head start. I taught myself assembly and FORTRAN and wrote programs to help at work. It wasn’t until 1992 that I started my first job where I actually had a computer on my desk at work. It was a lot of fun over the years riding the wave of upgrades as technology improved. Great video!
Great story!. I was a nerd kid in the late 90's, the PC scene at the time was Wild, my Dad bought the first family PC in 98 and about two years later the hard disk and memory were too small for me 😂, not good news for my Dad who doesn't understand why he had to spend more money on upgrades.
What industry did you end up transitioning into?
In 1987, I saw my first PC with an actual installed hard drive. It had the slot filled up where you loaded the software and it had a red dot light that was on. I remember asking what is that device? That is an actual hard drive. I was impressed.
The big problem with OS/2 on the '286 wasn't that it was getting "too big", but rather DOS compatibility.
The '286 was designed to boot in real mode and move to "protect" mode and never look back. There's no instruction to move back to real mode! There is _nothing_ like a virtual real mode that still keeps the protected-mode OS in control.
So, we had the "penalty box". You could have exactly 1 DOS session, which could not be windowed and, IIRC, stopped all multi-tasking -- the entire OS/2 system was pushed aside while it ran DOS in (actual) real mode. Oh, and that DOS-in-OS/2 could not see the long file names at all.
In order to return to real mode, the CPU was reset. It used the keyboard's 8042 microcontroller to toggle the reset line. The BIOS noticed it was a soft reset in this context and skipped the POST etc. and assumed everything was already loaded into memory and just started at a standard address.
OS.2 Warp was fun too, running Win 3.x apps
@@lucasrem Indeed, as a DOS developer, I found it to be the best version of DOS ever! It could run multiple sessions and even using bare-metal graphics, forcing it to run full-screen, multi-tasking continued.
There I was 1979 at the beginning of the computer revolution. I sold 6 TRS-80s in one month . October, I believe. I worked for Radio Shack. Those were the days heady...
I still used a 16 kB IBM 1401 with a Hollerith card interface in 1979. It was a time when a complete customer record must fit in 80 characters.
@@JohnnieWalkerGreen fixed size?
@@mito88 Yes, one customer record, one Hollweirh card.
My first computer at home was a TRS-80 CoCo2. I got it for Christmas either '84 or '85.
@@MayheM_72 CoCo1 in '82 with 4k of RAM ! ...LoL
I was a tech for IBM in the early 2000s and even then with the PCI bus THE standard, windows being shipped on 99% of IBM's own PCs, internally, the "superiority of microchanel and os/2 hype was still being hammered in to us hard. They made a mistake, they knew it, they didn't budge, and literally held the wheel while they drove the IBM PC business into the ground. Also, there was an article on Vice a few years ago about OS/2' still running on the NYC subway system and how it's basically preventing them from being able to add new payment methods that were popping up. Meaning they took all the customers they could along for the freefall ride.
Interesting
The problem was wordperfect was the most dangerous program conceivable. If you mistyped something after a special character, the whole document was obliterated, no cloud save, that was NEO GEO, you just opened a whole can full of whoop ass. Each and every time, why didn't they make Neo Geo? But if you had a Mac, this is fantastically impossible, the best you could do is rewrite *_OOHH GATES OHHH JOBS_* in the Word hexeditor
Sounds like some high level management at the NYC subway system needed to be replaced years ago.
It's interesting how IBM in It's attempt to milk the PC followed the same strategy as AT&T did with UNIX. You'd think senior management at IBM would at least be aware of how that attempt played out.
I mean, AT&T sort of pulled it off in terms of institutional sales until the NT kernel was halfway decent, they had gotten HP and IBM to buy into the system. IBM was merely trying to repeat what they had done - except that HP made their own machines and AT&T was about to be broken up and kneecapped. It was bad timing for an otherwise beautifully evil plan.
Nope, companies are always loath to cannibalize existing profitable business/products and don't realize the mistake until it is too late..
AT&Ts strategy was working incredibly well in 1981.
IBM is to PCs, as Kodak is to digital cameras! Both companies in the 1980s were innovators in breakthrough technology, but their management underestimated competitors and refused to listen to consumer demands! Although Compaq has been absorbed by HP, while Microsoft is bigger than ever, because they were able to adapt and diversify their business!
I worked for Motorola during this time. This post also describes Motorola in cellphones. "Customers do not need LCD displays, they do not care about battery life".
@ Motorola also missed a big opportunity in smartphones, they also failed to capitalize on breakthrough technology!
IBM 62 BILLION in revenue last year…. They bailed and stuck with what they knew
Best stock I ever bought.. great dividend… still growing …
Hardly a failure
@@g.t.richardson6311 IBM isn’t a failed company, but they aren’t as big as they once were, they let Microsoft and Apple take over the home computer business.
@@Markimark151 yes that is the point I was trying to make… most of the comments on here act like they are out of business
It is my number one stock in unrealized gain
Tripled my money…. In addition, it pays me a nice dividend every three months., very nice.
Maybe I’m confused. I didn’t know Microsoft made home computers, yes, I know they make software. And there are still plenty of people who don’t use Apple computers.
I loved working in the industry back then. All things were possible and all things were exciting; we were like techno kids in a candy store.
The sheer hubris and arrogance of IBM and the proprietary Micro-Channel Bus. I remember very well those early '80's. I was working for Data General Corporation whose minicomputers were still selling well then, but by the mid '90's that was to end in a sad, quiet collapse. Wang/Prime/DEC. Poof. Gone.
Along with all the other collateral damage. Apple only survived because of the massive advertising campaign, and the mythos of Steve Jobs.
We called it "the BS/2" back in its day. IBM was obviously trying to make everything else obsolete, and have nothing that already existed work with it. They even made the PS/2 computer cases too narrow for the then-ubiquitous 5.25" floppies. 3.5" or bust. Of course, startups like the company I worked for at the time would have none of that.
IBM has always been too hard-headed for their own good. Amazing engineers, but wanted to control everything for both the industry and the end user.
AT&T (and most of the so-called "Baby Bells) had, and still has, the same failing. Too bad, maybe? Which makes AT&T's attempts at getting into businesses such as entertainment content and bank cards even more laughable: they have very few transferable management skills and since divestiture, a true lack of institutional self-awareness. Oh well.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@gus473 Very true and agreed very entertaining. Had a friend working at AT&T and showed them how to save a lot of time and money, even developed the system on his own time. He was fired the next day.
For decades there was IBM and the riff raff, God and commoners. Also all systems were proprietary even if custom outside components were used, and it wasn't until the pc that components were standardized and Intel blew up.
@@jyy9624 In the 1960s, someone in the press described the US computer sector as "IBM and the seven dwarfs". IBM had over 65% of the entire computer base in the country. Over time, it became more like "IBM and the seven million munchkins" (per Stan Kelley) because computers became so much cheaper and also needed to do work. Eventually, it seems IBM wanted to work like the world was still the early 60s, but the customers and their competitors were working around IBM.
You just described every big corporation in America
Funny you say that one needed a shopping cart to carry around the Compaq portable. I used to work programming industrial controllers in the 80s and we used one of those PCs, and carried it in a cart. It was not a shopping cart tough but a quite robust one with large wheels and a wood base. Due to safety reasons, we only worked in pairs. My colleague at the time was studying for entrance in an university and those programming sessions could take hours but it was a one-man job so we had a deal: he would carry around the cart with the PC and tools, mount, dismount and clean it all and I would do all the programming while he use the time to study. This arrangement worked quite well for us both :)
adilsongoliveira
The Compaq i found was CRT in the case too, portable ? heavy box, way bigger than the 1980 cel phones !
It did VGA on monochrome, but good enough to run all !
This is part of the personal computer lore presented in the book Accidental Empires by Robert Cringley, and the subsequent documentary Triumph of the Nerds, back in the early 1990s. Yes, IBM's big mistake, was hesitating to go to the 386.
Where I worked, at the time, we had IBM Technical Reference Manual. Used it mostly for referencing the hardware, so to make plug in cards. The BIOS source listing was an appendix in that manual.
29:08 - Love that, that picture also has the older 8" Floppy. That's why it got its name, because the 8" was really floppy !
Pretty good book, as I recall.....
OS2 fumble was big too
as was the 5.25. 3.5 kept the term just because calling it a rigid would have served no gain and the disc inside the container was still floppy.
I bought a Columbia must be 40 years ago now. Great machine at the time, upgraded it with a 5MB HDD eventually. The sound produced when my programs accessed the hard disk was very satisfying.
I worked for a shop writing BASIC programs and remember when we got our first Compaq portable. Very impressive, I was wowed with the graphics capability and the jazzy ray trace of the Compaq logo when the machine booted.
All the sounds at the time were a large part of the experience. Floppy grinding, various beeps and peeps, flyback transformer hum, fan shushing, Winchester sizzle, modem dialing, and when things went wrong!
All silent now.
From the programmer's perspective, the 386 was the first one that actually worked. There was no going back
In those days, startup investment was counted in million with single-digit or fraction of it. Now it's always triple-digits or otherwise not worthy of being reported in the news. Some AI startups were fed several billions without any prospect of a profit within 5 years. Go figure!
Thanks!
Good video. I am old enough to remember most of this even though I was a teenager in the 80s. regarding MCA, IBM, a name which had far more power and influence than is conceivable today, copyrighted everything to control it. And it wasn't long before they were begging people to make versions of their own. Nobody did.
The original problem for IBM was, they made a wonderful new PC platform, except that the two parts that made all the money and had all the control, the microprocessor and the operating system, they didn't control. Other companies did.
In the late 80s and following the clone makers went crazy. It was an awesome time to be a consumer.
I remember as a kid being very underwhelmed when the PS/2 line came out, thinking that they came out with something worse than before, with blatant lock in, and it costs way more money than the competition too! Uh.. no. And the Mac and Amiga were there, pointing the way to the future, even if Commodore itself, later self-destructed.
@ well, they were expensive as you might expect. However the MCA did have several advantages, which we would see later in competing architectures. first, the slot was physically smaller. But more important, the system automatically assigned interrupts. If you've ever tried to resolve an interrupt conflict manually you know how on pleasant that can be.
@@kevinbarry71 It wasn't especially difficult dealing with IRQ conflicts, I remember doing that in the 90s.
I was there in 82 working at IBM FSB Gathersburg MD. While IBMs competition was innovating, IBM was pushing Microchannel junk that was far behind the day it was announced. They tried to lock in the market, as opposed to making a better product
Gaithersburg?
The government company my wife worked for
purchased lots and lots of IBM PS/2 Model 80. They paid AUD $24,000 each. ( about USD $16,500 ). They each came with micro-channel bus
3270 adaptor cards, so each Model 80 could still connect to their Mainframe in Melbourne.
For comparison, Olivetti 386DX computers were around AUD $4,000 at the time. ( BUT WITHOUT 3270 emulator cards, of course )
.
39:00 I was thinking about the same thing. AT&T lost the Unix market because of their license fees. I was inside IBM at the time developing their AIX watching them tell AT&T no and thus was born OSF (which was a miserable failure but the egg had been splattered).
The video title alone is clickbait. But of the (unfortunately rare) good kind! The history of technology videos you make continue to be of the highest quality and are exceedingly well-researched.
I appreciate your diligence and efforts in everything you do, particularly in this area.
It's not clickbait when the title tells what the content is. So this title and video is the exact opposite of clickbait 😅
@MaxQ10001 I meant that as a joke really. Though I could understand if somebody mistook what I said. Great video nonetheless
@BeachTypeZaku yes, great video 😍
19:00 Battle of Chickamauga, 1863!!! Love this channel!
And the 3.5" floppy stays with us today as the save icon. Which does make one wonder, How long will it be the save icon. I have not had a PC with an FDD in ages, I do remember having one with both 5.25 and 3.5.
As long as there isn't a new symbol with the same universal understanding.
I assume it will be an arrow upwards into a cloud at some point *ugh*
The rumor at the time is that IBM corporate doubted Microsoft had good title to PC-DOS, and stayed as far away from an exclusive agreement to limit liability.
Little did they know gates was CIA and nothing really mattered
Wow! I was too young to be able to afford PC magazines to know that. :)
@@erictayet I lived in San Jose at the time, and had some customers who were in the industry. A fair number had low opinions of Bill Gates’ business ethics.
@@tomhalla426 He was extremely competitive and ruthless, that's for sure!
Excellent overview. Another issue is that when IBM introduced the ps/2 there was a 286 machine running ISA and the clones were running chips at a faster clock rate more often than not. Channels also keep pushing clones on people asking for IBM.
Love the fact that a lot of the images have the Model M keyboard, which didn't appear until the PS/2. I'm typing this on a nearly-40-year-old Model M which is still going strong. At least on of the images has the rare tenkeyless Model M; you don't wanna know what those sell for on eBay.
Yes, I'm a keyboard geek.
Yep me too, the only part of a real PC i have left, a ps2 original model m keyboard. I keep buying mechanical keyboards to replace it but they have yet to do so. Please someone replicate the buckling spring switch.
@@anticat900 The closest thing on the market now is probably Unicomp's New Model M buckling-spring keyboards; I'm typing this right now on one. But even they aren't going to be _exactly_ the same as original IBM or Lexmark Model Ms, I'd imagine.
Meower68
we bought the old German Cherry keyboards back then, din was all they did.
needed PS/2, still have them here.
Germany, many thanks, your product manager !!!
My favorite keyboard is a Model F which came with the original PC/AT 5170. Love to hear those key switches clack.
@dalecomer5951 mot for me those funny single wide keys didn't work for me
I love your videos in general, but this has to be one of the best in quite a while.
Great work!
A great channel that makes hollywood movie lenght quality videos on this exact topic is named (counter intuitively) "Another Boring Topic".
They sadly only post new videos a few times each year. But the wait is worth it.
Multi Hour long content on the history of OS2, Windows, Office, 3D Software, ect..
I worked at IBM on OS/2. My first PC was an XT. Then a PS/2 model 70, then a model 80 (85? it was a 486) then a model 90. I wish I still had those computers, even as display pieces, even though it took almost a miracle to find a microchannel sound card. IBM made such dumb decisions in retrospective; they were trying to apply the model that had worked for them in other markets to the PC space without realizing that the PC space was so different - they couldn't see it. Those moments are ALWAYS opportunities for those who have the vision.
Thank you - what a superb recollection. Really enjoyed reliving these periods.
3:03 John Titor sends his regards
el psy kongroo
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
It is all per the will of steins gate
itt: people who have considered moving to pahrump Nevada
@@MayaUndefined why??? I lived in Las Vegas for 25 years. Pahrump is a dust bowl...old hippies.
My dad was selling non-brand PC clone in Hong Kong to China. Motherboard from Taiwan, CPU and graphics card from US, RAM from Japan or later Korea. The Chinese customer will ask my Dad to find some fake IBM box and user manual and resell them in China as real IBM. It was a good day back then.
СНУИА didn't change since then, faking fakes
2:33 ad skip
I'm sorry, but the idea of IBM's PC DOS being a modified MS-DOS is completely backwards. Microsoft bought Seattle Computer Products CP/M clone, 86-DOS (also known as QDOS) in order to fulfil the contract Microsoft signed with IBM to provide an OS. Microsoft retained the rights to this OS, including rights to redistribute it, and sold it to other vendors (notably, but not exclusively, to DEC for the Rainbow 100). Therefore, MS-DOS was more a derivative of PC-DOS, and not the other way round, as you imply
Microsoft bought 86dos under the instruction of IBM and then modified it to meet IBMs specifications. Bill Gates suggested IBM buy 86dos themselves, IBM said no. He asked if he could sell it to anyone else, IBM said yes. IBM were crazy
Great video but a small disappointment was not mentioning the Turbo button on early PCs. I just learned that it had a purpose: some software used the CPU as a timer assuming the speed of the original PC but newer computers running faster made some games unplayable so non-turbo mode put the computer back to original PC speed.
As for the 386, I joined a company in 1991 that bought one and had 16 terminals running off it because it was so powerful by the standards of the day.
Also, does the HP-150 at 10:32 remind anyone else of the original Mac which came out a little later?
The "partly pregnant" comment was no doubt a nod to the "Mythical Man-Month" concept coined by Fred Brooks, an architect at IBM. The idea is that a project is like a pregnancy-you can't get a baby in 1 month just by adding 9 women!
17:53 John Cleese? 😂😂😂
You left off the IBM Portable PC. I used one at IBM Semiconductor to monitor plasma emissions for etch endpoint detection. It was a beast that needed a cart to move around the lab. I never saw one outside the building.
My dad was assigned one of those - he was working for an insurance company. He took it with him on one trip and never again. I ended up adopting it. Fond memories, my first exposure to a 'real' computer.
jaykita2069
The 1983 IBM Plasma screen, it was touche too, we did have them here too !
a close to the government related library system.
monochrome !!!
There were expansion slots in the Altair and in many CP/M computers, not just the Apple ii
10:54 My advisor in college told me about his first computer, an Osborne 1. There was a clock in the disk (or maybe tape?) drive that was not stable over temperature, so if the machine was cold it could not read back data that was written while hot and vice versa. He had to write down how long the machine was on (as a proxy for temperature) when writing data so it could be read back correctly.
I took a nerdy pilgrimage tour earlier this year to the Vintage Computer Festival SouthWest in Dallas, followed by the Computer Histroy Museum in Mountain View. Got good vibes seeing so much history on display again in this video
I love this story. It never gets old, and Jon’s perspective adds a lot of insights I’ve not properly understood or digested. Excellent.
Thanks again, love the semiconductor series, facinating stuff!
I worked at IBM 1969-2006. Yes IBM was that dumb.
In the mid 90s, someone in my apartment complex threw away a perfectly good IBM XT PC with a green phosphor screen and several boxes of 5 1/4" floppies. I went dumpster diving and hauled out the computer. I was a nerd back then and even had subscriptions to Computer Shopper magazine and Software of the Month Club. When I got the IBM disassembled, cleaned, re-assembled, I played the included games, ran some diagnostics I had, and blessed the IBM as "clean." I listed the IBM XT with its green screen and boxes of disks in the classified ads and sold the lot the same day the classified print hit the stands.
Fun trip down memory lane. My first PC was a no-name XT clone "souped" up with a NEC V20 CPU in the late 1980s. Then in the 90s worked at NEC Technologies and DEC developing PCs. I was a big fan of EISA until Intel killed it with PCI. Absolutely agree it was IBM's greed to lock things down with the PS/2 that doomed their PC biz.
@tomschmidt381 I'm surprised NEC never ended up with a x86 cross licencing deal with intel & AMD . NEC had a lot of potential to be like the big trillion dollar American tech companies or Samsung as far as I'm concerned.
Made their own x86 CPUs as you mentioned, did well in the Japanese computer market with the NEC 88/98 , turbo grafx/PC FX video game consoles(plus MIPs CPU licence for n64 CPU & Dreamcast power VR GPU plus GPUs for PCs in the late 90s early00s), fax machines in the 80s n 90s.
@@cryptocsguy9282 NEC also had a fantastic CRT display group that we worked with so NEC was well positioned in the PC space in the US and as you mentioned NEC dominated the Japanese market.
Just for future reference, the American company known as Zenith is properly pronounced "ZEEnith". Here in the U.S. we say it that way. I don't know why. Great story! I'd gotten the basics of it from an old documentary called "Triumph of the Nerds" but you went into way greater detail and I appreciate it very much!
Thanks a lot it brings back my childhood I had also a XT IBM 😅
if you pay north vpn, and day after look for cancel , you will never get your money back, be aware
During the 1990s, the company I worked for developed Win 3.1 GUI programs on IBM OS/2. The reason was the customer originally wanted OS/2 PM programs but then decided they preferred Win 3.1 GUI. The GUI windows code is somewhat similar between OS/2 PM and Win 3.1. I remember it was very pleasant developing and testing the Win 3.1 programs on OS/2.
Congratulations on the excellent video! I love all your videos, but your videos about computer history are even better!
I worked in Computer field service back then. It was apparent the IBM was trying to do what they always did. Sell business machines at businesses at a premium. They originally had to intentions of selling directly to consumers. Consumers could afford what they wanted to sell.
It reminds me of my IBM PC XT in 1984.
1) The IBM PC XT consisted of two boxes: the CPU unit and the hard disk unit.
2) The system performed a POST (Power-On Self-Test) to check each memory location one by one, which took a long time.
3) The keyboard was famously noisy (buckling spring mechanism)
And the finest keyboard design ever made.
@@johnathin0061892 I still remember how the keys feel, to this day.
I loved that keyboard
You are mistaken. The XT never came in two boxes, and the model with two boxes you are thinking of was an IBM mainframe terminal or 3270 emulator. I can't remember the details now; it was 40 years ago.
@@DumbledoreMcCracken Mea culpa! I was unaware that there were also IBM XTs with only one unit. Apparently, the IBM 5161 Expansion Unit was optional. From Wikipedia: The 5161 is an expansion chassis using an identical case and power supply to the XT, but instead of a system board, provides a backplane with eight card slots. It connects to the main system unit using an Extender Card in the system unit and a Receiver Card in the Expansion Unit, connected by a custom cable.[3] The 5161 shipped with a 10 MB hard drive, and had room for a second one.
Excellent summary. I lived this and worked in the PC industry during this time frame. My one regret is that I didn't work for any major supplier at the time so I wasn't involved in any of the key decision making. 🤔
the Apple II wasn't a big success at the start though, the Apple ][ sold 10,000 in 2 years, and then 40,000 of the Apple ][+ meanwhile the TRS-80 and Commodore P.E.T where doing over 100,000. Then the VIC-20 turned up, and left the rest in its dust only for the 64 to show and leave everything in its dust. The Apple //e did well with Visicalc and then schools. After that the only other model to sell well was the IIgs which hit a million, again popular with schools. The Commodore 128 sold about the same amount as all of the Apple 8bits in 4 years as Apple sold from the 78 to 94. The Commodore 128 is called a failure by most people.
Yeah, Apple wasn't a big thing in the US outside schools/institutions that used the hardware regularly during the 1980's.
So great!!! I love the chip and fab focus, but I REALLY like how you expand out.
Im old and I lived this! Haha. I haven’t heard the term Micro Channel in decades. 😂
It's not much history, but the history of computing hardware and dominance in the space seems to repeatedly show that the dominant one misses the boat on a format and paradigm change. IBM missed the boat on the PC when mainframes were being overtaken and computing was decentralized. Intel missed the boat on small, energy efficient, low-power processors in mobile devices that overtook the PC, further decentralizing computing and offloading heavy tasks from local computation to networked heavier lifting. And then those producers who did well in the mobile space like Qualcomm and ARM never had time to establish a single dominant player, because everyone other than Nvidia and AMD missed the boat on GPU architecture to feed cloud computing and now AI computing demand. I wonder what the future will look like if the trend in shrinking and decentralizing continues.
Microchannel was a solution looking for a problem. The only thing requiring that performance was the graphics subsystem. The clones solved that single problem with the vesa bus closely connected to the processor. Later of course, PCI solved the overall problem supporting graphics and all the newer performance demands.
also AGP
@@mike_w-tw6jd correct, how soon we forget.
Great vid @asianometry - would it be too soon to do a video of the IBM decision to jettison Thinkpad to Lenovo ?
21:13 look at ALL that copy! You never see ads like that now
6:25 I was a freshman in college. An accounting professor went on for ten minutes about how we had no idea how hard the world had just flipped upside down, and we should all get an IBM PC right away. I thought "pfffbt, a very expensive game machine". Now I work in a dev lab for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The world moves quickly alright.
bro dude..
what bothers me deeply is that tech channels sell VPNs as a "security enhancement" when really it only is for unencrypted traffic which is literally nowhere to be found anymore.
SSL is a big enough security feature, also discarding MITM attacks and encrypting web traffic.
there is only one benefit of a vpn and that is that you can pirate stuff without showing off your ip.
but please stop selling this as a security tool. it is really not since you just shift trust from an isp to a vpn provider.
Nothing is truly encrypted for the public, but it's better than nothing. Honestly, we lost the battle on data encryption being the standard a long time ago when Microsoft held the reins with the likes of Google and TH-cam. They are way too strong now and the wider world accepts that their data getting sold off is just the cost of using the internet.
@@Jin-1337 yes. it is all about trusted CAs. and those cannot be truly reliable since political interests are interfering and dictating on those certificates - since they are trust-based like everything in life. but it helps protecting anyone from random creeps.
In 1982, Big Blue saved the world from Apple dominance in the PC market by opening their hardware design. Apple responded with their 1984 ad, painting openness as oppression.
Apple's only goal, at the time, was to sell a $75 computer for $2495. May they never change!
FWIW In 1981 the Atari 800 was outselling the Apple II
Apple has tried to be Big Brother ever since.
Olivetti CP486 was their first EISA computer - when we unpacked it in the lab we were blown away with the backwards compatible slots
I don't think the title is clickbait. This was really well done as usually you do.
I love all your videos so much… I never truly appreciated the rich history of the industry and areas where I worked for years
38:59 I thought you were going to talk about the rebellion and the Death Star for a moment.
I'm so glad I got to work on a Deskpro 386, both DOS and XENIX. Such a wonderful machine. The keyboard felt a little weird but I got used to it.
I started working in a PC dealerships in the early 80s and saw these changes first hand , it was a wild scary ride , it seemed every week there seemed to be a new Compaq PC or a new software release to master , being young and with ties it was wonderful.
I ended up working for one of my customers using an IBM PS/" Model 70 with OS/2 on it .. Ah well we all make mistakes!
I still remember the MCA-vs-EISA war, then the PCI-vs-VLBus war. Those two wars are what made computers a commodity.
In Brazil, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, people generally bought American Apple Plus computers and national computers manufactured by Prologica, Scopus and Itautec. My first computer was a legendary Prologica Solution 16, a very reliable machine that had two floppy disk slots. I made a lot of money with this machine for about 3 years until I bought a PC with a hard drive.
IBM refused to price anything that a consumer could not get cheaper elsewhere and made thier stuff proprietary which no-one wanted. They really shot themself in the foot with OS2 by pricing it at eye watering levels with no software to run on it!
I worked for CPQ - this excellent YT makes me nostalgic.
I loved your collaboration from last week 😊😊
wow is IBM still in business
"Big Blue's balance sheet is in decent shape. Exiting Q2, total assets stood at $133.8 billion, with $12.2 billion of that in cash and equivalents. Its Q2 total liabilities were $109.7 billion, including $56.5 billion in debt. Oct 10, 2024"
They're in better shape than Intel right now. Compaq got bought, and Microsoft is well.. Microsoft.
@@MrHav1knot really sure if you’re saying Microsoft is doing bad because it’s not. They just made half of what IBM made in an entire year in a single quarter.
Sort of. They sold off their PC stuff to a company in mainland China called Lenovo, who still make PCs..
Yes. They own Red Hat Linux.
The series "Halt and Catch Fire" gives a semi-fictional version of this story.
Mostly fictional but it was fun.
Long time watcher, is this the first sponsorship? I can’t remember the last time it wasn’t funded by the patron. Not a complaint just a honest question. Keep up the good work
A very detailed and insightful analysis.
Thanks for this video.
I worked on OS/2 networking for a while, for a contractor on the IBM side. Basically every dumb feature requested by any senior IBM salesman had to be incorporated, while Microsoft just laughed and kept their version of OS/2 clean.
Not mentioned was that as IBM had done most of the research for OS/2 and Microsoft did most of the coding, Microsoft began to develop a new operating system, Windows NT, that was remarkably similar to OS/2. It wasn't identical, yet it borrowed many of the ideas IBM was trying to incorporate into OS/2. So, Microsoft benefitted form the research done by IBM and done with IBM money. The great salesman run behemoth of IBM was steamrolled by a nerd!
The stillborn final version of OS/2, OS/2 for PowerPC, was developed collaboratively by IBM Boca, OSF/RI, and DEC's Embedded and Real-Time Business Unit. It differed dramatically from previous OS/2's and from Windows NT.
Sorry, but most observers, including well known Prof/Dr Tannembaum, agree that OS/2 was inspired by MULTICS, meanwhile Win-NT was inspired by DEC's VMS, via Dave Cutler
@@williamyf Sorry, NT was created during and after OS/2 -- no way the concepts that IBM provided managed to make it into NT happened without knowingly doing so!
@@williamyf OS/2 for PowerPC was not inspired by MULTICS. It was an OS/2 version inspired by the OSF/MK variant of OSF/1, which had a version of the UNIX personality.
Just in time for my evening commute
Lucky you! I already sat in my traffic today...
As a software developer I tried to code for OS/2, but it was such an expensive hassle to buy the required IBM C compiler and SDK that I gave up. Microsoft C sold for a fraction of the price, and the Windows SDK was free. It was a no brainer which to choose.
NordVPN partnership made me sad, I'll need to add a strike to my excel...
Proprietary, over-priced, slow junk with management that had no clue. That is how. The PS/2 Model 25 was 8mhz 8086 with ISA, not MCA.
In the mid 80’s I used a Compaq portable to manage a mailing list. It was the first pc I had ever used.
My first pc, a PC clone I was so proud of. A 386 that froze if I stopped working (Word Perfect) so it was save save save and reboots as needed. Loved it though. Richard Feynman was right about just playing with a computer. It is addictive and time can just go away. So long.
Good documentary. Thank you!
One bone to pick, though:
"... M$ released wind0$e 3.0 - The first two iterations [of wind0$e] were awful". -> Implying that wind0$e 3.0 was good? - Sorry mate, _any_ wind0$e prior to Win95 was and still is outright awful! Any PC I had to use back then where I was confronted with the wind0$e clown-suit on top of DOS resulted in me immediately exiting to the DOS prompt and carrying on from there! 😂
Win95 was a significant improvement, but ultimately painful enough that I persisted with the then obsolescent Amiga at home until the Mac G4 came out. In relative terms, Wn98 and XP were OK (just) and NT was alright for server stuff, but really, M$ hadn't had particularly good OSes between [M$] DOS6.22 and until Win7 came along, which was actually pretty good. Win10, _sans_ telemetry is not bad, but we're going downhill again with Win11.
Can you imagine how much harder this would have been if software patents were as ubiquitous as they are now?
Congratulations on getting a sponsorship 😊🎉
Eventually IBM would even produce 486 and Pentium based PC clones based on the Industry standards not their own proprietary ones. It is surprising how many of IBM's partners would end up working with the clone Industry to develop industry standards.The PS/2 would be a fatal mistake but when cloners realised they could compete on price and performance (such as Turbo XT clones), IBM had already lost. Highly integrated VLSI AT chipsets started a race to the bottom for price eventually leading to Single Chip AT Chipsets. It sure made it cheaper to make a motherboard when you can go from dozens of through hole ICs to a single surface mount ASIC. The AT was a fantastic computer but by then it was too late, the clone Market was way too Mature. The AT being so good is why our Modern PCs are still partially AT compatible. Its taking a very long time for the industry to finally say we can completely drop AT compatibility. It will be the end of a long era when we can no longer boot to MS-DOS on any new computer. The Industry as a whole is very adverse to breaking that Magic Backwards Compatibility that won them the war in the first place.
Great video as always!
Thanks, Jon. Another interesting video!
I've been waiting for this episode ever since it was mentioned in the Dwarkesh Patel interview
Publishing the BIOS source code was an epic decision --- it taught an entire generation of kids how the thing worked --- maybe IBM was prophetic in thinking this was a small product in a small market. It was an egg.
tomholroyd7519
We did needed a EU system, running 100% IBM compatible.
THe EU laws gave us the freedom, Phoenix produced it !
Tulip Computers did it, close connections to the governments in Europe made it 100% legal
Phoenix !
Before the PS2 line there was a saying in the business world that no one had ever been fired for buying an IBM. That saying vanished after the PS2 line came out, people did get fired for buying those. Most of the old software didn't run on them, and most of the older hardware did work. Looking back on it, the PS2 line really was a delusional choice from IBM at the time.