Yes, the book (Big Blues) describes what you speak of above. It also
describes how once the PC and PC/AT became wildly successful that the
big product managers at IBM who at first didn't want anything to do
with Boca Raton, suddenly be began fighting over getting a piece of
the action and in doing so destroyed the original development group.
True?
Yes that's true. When the PC was first planned for intro in the EMEA
region (Europe, Middle East & Africa), it was decided by the CMC in
New York to locate EMEA Entry Systems HQ in London to avoid it being
sucked into Big Blue's standard beaurocracy (designed for a mainframe
corp selling low-volume products with high profits per box, not
high-volume PC products with low profits per box).
That was in about late 1979/early 1980.
The rest of EMEA Big Blue HQ was located in Paris. The folks in Paris
never really accepted that ES was none of their business but following
a long tug-o-war between Paris and London, in late 1987 the Entry
Systems HQ in London was relocated to Paris and it no longer operated
as a seperate IBU (Independent Business Unit). That was timed for a
few months after the PS/2 was announced in April 1987. I was
personally invited to move to Paris to continue my job but declined,
having worked in Paris some years earlier in another IBM job and I
didn't want another 3yr+ stint over there.
Helping the argument for consolidation was the unfortunate fact that
in developing the PC on a budget, Boca had produced a box which used
a different architecture (ASCII - pinched from the teletype) to IBM
mainframes (EBCDIC) and also the S/38 which used Extended-EBCDIC.
That basic incompatibility continued to haunt IBM for years.
Networking PCs into mainframes was a real problem.
What had happened is that the PC had become massively more popular
than planned or expected (but as I predicted
) and its shortcomings
were then blamed on Boca & Co, whereas the real problem was its
success not its failure, and the limited timescale/budget that Boca
had to develop the box originally.
There was also the internal political power struggle by those in Big
Blue who feared that the PC business was becoming *too powerful*.
Big Blue product Generals would have none of that.
BTW, IMO the PC/2 and the MCA were the death knell for the IBM PC
business.
Fair comment. the choice for IBM at the time was v/difficult. On the
one hand, the open architecture of PC family 1 meant that OEM was
producing unlimited add-ons and upgrades which were often better than
IBM's own kit and were beginning to drive the product up market which
IBM never really wanted: great risk of IBM losing control; on the
other hand PS/2 sought to regain control with MCA and OS/2 but as
we see it was too late - Pandora's box had been opened.
With Windows coming on strong, the AT architecture became more
popular, not less, and everything PC today has derived from the AT,
not PS/2 and MCA. The main reason of course is that PS/2 and MCA
were closed architectures, so OEM avoided it altogether and stayed
with the AT.
I was managing a small computer group at the time MCA was
introduced and after looking at the specs, we all decided that we
would never buy it for the group. I guess a lot of others felt the
same way.
Indeed.
MCA was marketed as having a superior and faster bus than AT but
in reality it was introduced to regain control of the market, not for
technological reasons. I doubt if IBM have ever admitted this.
