IBM, the PS/2 and Why PCs are as they are...

Herewith an IM exchange from a few years back in which I opine as to when, and how, IBM lost control of PC design and standards. "Tristram" is Darren, a Macolyte par excellence.

Myself: Greetings.

Tristram: How goes it?

Myself: I am having new iMac hallucinations.

Tristram: As am I.. however, my need to keep my finances in some semblance of order has quelled the uprising. I DO think the thing will sell at a solid rate,
however.

Myself: Oh hell yes.

Myself: And I am angrier than ever at the so-called computer makes on the PC side. Looking at the iLamp, I mean, iMac, one realizes how little design and engineering (and thought of any kind) goes into PCs. They really have become mere office supplies, like staplers and fax machines and the like.

Tristram: Pretty damn close thereto, that's true. Function far outstrips form. But for so many PC users, that's just fine.

Myself: All too true. If ya think about it, we really shouldn't speak of "Dell computers" or "Compaq computers" apart from servers or high-end workstations (which actually are designed from the ground up). Apart from those specialty machines, most "brand" PCs are nothing of the kind. They are wholly interchangeable. Someone else makes the mobo, the chip, the drives, etc. Dell or whoever just assembles them (badly).

Tristram: Well, Dell is actually said to be fairly competent. I don't know about the individual MAN, Dell, but they say his company puts together a fairly passable unit.

Myself: Botheration. However, I think Steve is onto something. Apple has to be, well, different. They can't win the "office equipment" battle, because of issues of cost and scale that are - at least for now - insurmountable.

Myself: When I show my PC pals the new iMac pictures, they openly smile. "That's so....great..." is the usual response. And these are longtime, cynical computer guys.

Tristram: Wow. That's amazing to hear... and what did they think of the original iMac three years ago, or the Cube a year and a half ago, just out of curiosity?

Myself: They disliked the lack of a floppy drive and no onboard SCSI port - which even I had to admit was a very fair criticism - a lot of these guys had expensive SCSI devices, and how much would it have cost, really, to slap a 25-pin SCSI-2 connection on the side, next to the USB ports? They loved the iMac's design, though.

Tristram: Well, that is comforting. So they are able to discern what is good and what is chaff.

Myself: As for the Cube, they raved about the design but thought it was pricey (esp sans monitor) and wondered about its market prospects. One said, "You can't have design for design's sake. The Cube should win all sorts of awards... but will it SELL?"

Tristram: But in neither case did they scoff or laugh at the bold designs.

Myself: No. They, like I, love design. We're all ID disciples. The highest achievement of any tool is transparency; do the job without getting in the way of the job.

Tristram: I agree.. thus the appeal of the entire Mac solution.

Myself: Agreed. Although, of course, versatility imposes complication. No way 'round that. But what I like about Apple is that they keep plugging.

Tristram: Yes.. that's definitely the case.. as these machines become more capable, they become increasingly more complex and unstable.

Tristram: Until the advent of the "Modern OSes" that we now have, where a best-of-all-worlds situation can (theoretically) exist. We'll see.

Myself: Right. PCs are horrible in this regard, although WinXP is a big step up. But we must remember that PC development was marketing driven once IBM lost any kind of control (circa 1986-87).

Myself: From that point, security and stability didn't matter. Make 'em cheap, build a lot of them, and sell as many as possible. Oh - and maintain backward compatibility at all costs, as a selling point so folks won't have to repurchase their software libraries when they upgrade. Marketing, marketing, marketing.

Tristram: Right. To that end, meet the parallel port.

Myself: The tech-heads at the OEMs knew then, and know how, how shoddy most of the design was, and how screwy the software was. But their hands were tied. They loudly complained, but they weren't in charge.

Myself: I consider the 86-87 period a watershed in PC tech and system design, not the intro of the AT platform in 84 or the 386 or even the price collapse engineered by Compaq in 1991/2. I have a strange reason, but I think it holds up.

Tristram: Do tell. Most less-informed tech-heads would put the focus on a later time, perhaps, or earlier, I would think. But I'm sure you have a cogent rationale behind this.

Myself: Ok, here it is: in 1986, IBM realized they had utterly lost control of the PC. Dirt-cheap, 100% PC-compatible mobos were arriving from the East (Taiwan, esp), Intel would sell the chips to anyone, and - of course - Microsoft couldn't license DOS fast enough.

Myself: Because IBM had used off-the-shelf parts to make the PC (for reasons of cost and speed of design back when they first rolled it out), they had no control at all over the hardware. The only real "IBM" part was the BIOS, which Compaq cracked -followed by many others. So, what to do?

Myself: IBM's answer was: when you're losing the game, change the rules.

Tristram: Most Kirk-like of them.

Myself: (Trivia aside: IBM's cost per unit for the original PCs was VERY low. They actually ran a smooth, lean operation as far as PCs went. The problem was the enormous, and I mean enormous, overhead of the rest of IBM. But IBM could - and did - build the actual PCs cheaply as Compaq or anyone else did.)

Myself: Anyway... IBM decided to "restart" the PC market with a new series of machines. These were IBM all the way, designed in-house and proprietary (and patented) from snout to tail. No off-the-shelf serial ports or third-party chips here.

Myself: They secured exclusive licenses from Intel and fixed the machines so they would only run IBM's PC-DOS, not the general Microsoft MS-DOS. In order to shoot the aftermarket card makers through the head, IBM redesigned the mobo and introduced MicroChannel 32-bit architecture.

Myself: IBM, in other words, was going out of it's way to make a computer that was NOT compatible with the original PC/XT/AT series.

Tristram: Right. Interesting. A whole new beast that ran their OS well... Mac-like in the sense that they controlled the complete product.

Myself: Exactly. Take THAT, clone-makers! IBM also planned to roll out OS/2 as the preloaded OS - but most of them wound up running PC-DOS because OS/2 wouldn't be ready for several more years. (The OS/2 fiasco deserves its own conversation...)

Myself: So, they called these new machines Personal System 2 (PS2) and rolled them out in 1987 with massive publicity. They even offered a "cloning license", for a steep price, you could start an OEM company and build specialty PS2s (license revocable at will by IBM).

Myself: Some of the PS2s were marvelous. The PS2/80, as I recall, could be disassembled like Lego bricks for service. The PS2s introduced the 3.5 diskette, VGA graphics, the now-familiar PS2-style mouse and keyboard connectors, and a host of other things. There was some solid design behind these things.

Tristram: I remember the PS/2 concept, but I didn't know what was behind it all.

Myself: But they were expensive, proprietary and the performance results were mixed. Had the things been barnburners, the computer world might be very different. But they weren't. Your average Compaq DeskPro 386/20 could match them, and cost 1/3 less, and was - and was industry standard for expansion boards and drives. And that was the killer.

Myself: For the first time in PC-dom, the term "industry standard" not only did not refer to what IBM was doing - it was opposed to what IBM was doing. IBM had actually "Apple'd" itself into opposing the Intel/AT mobo/MS-DOS platform juggernaut; they were knocked flat.

Tristram: Hmm. Interesting in the extreme. Amazing that these culled-together machines, these bastardized Frankenstein's monsters of the computing world, could actually DO anything with something approaching, and even exceeding the aplomb of these finely-tuned machines.

Myself: The kiss of death came when it was discovered that the PS2 series had trouble running versions of Lotus 1-2-3 and Flight Simulator (these were the "reference" software programs used to gauge PC-compatibility) because of video issues.

Tristram: Or Apple's equally-finely-tuned machines.

Myself: Yup. And the PS2's fate was sealed. A number of PC-clone makers formed the so-called Group of Eight and publicly swore they would have nothing to do with the PS2 licensing, MicroChannel or any of it. Shortly afterward, they created a 32bit "new" - but backward compatible - daughtercard and slot design called "EISA."

Myself: IBM just fell apart after that, and would not recover until the mid-90s. A fair number of PS2s were sold to the government and large businesses (no surprise there, eh?) but as far as PC-land went, IBM became irrelevant.

Tristram: Hmph. Well... that's fascinating stuff. I suppose the combined might of a thousand companies pursuing performance and compatibility from a hundred different angles was enough to overcome the singular excellence of IBM.

Myself: Right. Exactly. And that's the problem. With IBM off the throne, leadership passed to... nobody. The only 'leadership' was a committee of hundreds (the cloners, Intel and Microsoft, and the 3rd party software and hardware makers) whose only possible collective decision was this:

Don't have a repeat of the PS2. Don't take chances. No radical design advances. Maintain compatibility at all costs.

Myself: And we've been there, more or less, ever since. Thus endeth the story. Hope it wasn't too boring.

Tristram: Not at all. Very, very interesting. Though the end result is pretty boring. Thankfully, software design hasn't been quite so stagnant through it all.

Myself: No, thank God for software. And, to be fair, there is something to be said for enduring standards. Alas, I don't see any way out of it. The PC market is so massive that advances are slow, grudging and troublesome.

Tristram: Right. The question becomes - when will the industry MANDATE a change? When will the needs of the customer dictate that something needs to change?

Myself: The "cool" stuff that happens seems to occur only when the expanding PC market bumps into something that already exists. Internet, digital video and audio... these things existed "outside" the PC before you could do them ON a PC. Which is why I think Apple has got it right. Computers are no longer some enclosed world of apps and games and printers and the like... They have to "mesh" with consumer electronics and other communication technologies.

Myself: And the thing about Apple is, they seem to really care about "meshing" properly. At the recent Keynote, Jobs mentioned what a pain in the ass digital photos can be, with different apps to capture, edit and organize photos.

Tristram: Right. Such is the case in many fields of digital lifestyling.

Myself: This is so true. Everyone knows it. But the PC folks won't move on it because - God forbid - that would mean presenting a new standard for integrating these tasks and taking a risk. The PC attitude is one of resignation. "Yeah, it's a pain, but it works, more or less." I'm guilty of this myself.

Myself: The Steve said another interesting thing: we would find it absurd to read, but not want to (or be able to) write. Yet in this video age, we are so much all spectators, but not creators. Dammit, cameras and good editing software are essential to our time. Why NOT have a zillion people making their own movies? Lots of folks have stories to tell. Okay, most of it will be crap - but so what? They’re just electrons. Erase it and try again.

Tristram: So true. The key, however, becomes informing the masses that this is something that can be done, should be done, and is now available. And to let them know WHERE it's at, before the PC world stumbles into something approaching parity.

Myself: Right. And call me an elitist, but quality costs money. Macs are on the balance pricier than PCs because of market share, economy of scale, etc. So be it. But you still get one HELL of a computer for the money, and the excellence of design and ease of use DOES make a difference. And at $1299, the new iMac entry-level is a bargain.

Tristram: Longevity counts, as well.

Myself: Yes, that, too. Buying a Mac is like buying a car. Three years' on, it will still be there.

Myself: Speaking of: after the "Megahertz Myth," Apple needs to take head-on the "upgrade" myth. Most people - the solid majority - should NOT have to buy a new computer every 18 mos or two years. That is, pardon my Swahili, bullshit.

Myself: Yes, some will always need the "latest and greatest." But for most folks, the iMac you buy now should serve you faithfully for years. This whole despicable scheme of building (and buying) crap computers because, hell, in 12 months I'm just going to toss it anyway and get a new one, has got to go. This was marketing brainwashing by companies that based their business models on massive volume sales of soft/hardware and therefore had to convince us there was something "wrong" with us if our machines were older than 2 years.

Myself: My 3 year old iMac runs like a clock. Only thing I ever did was add RAM.

Tristram: True enough. The built-in obsolescence thing has been eaten up by the buying public. They really believe in it. Of course, on the PC side, sometimes the two-year obsolescence myth holds true!

Myself: "Oh no, the new 10Ghz MetaPentium liquid-nitro-cooled PCs are out with particle-accelerated video cards and 20 GB of RAM! I must have one! How can I run Word and get email without it! Where's my credit card?!"

Tristram: Not to mention the old couple that came into the Hauppauge Apple store in mid-November, purchased a Dual-800 G4 with not one, but TWO Cinema Displays and an additional video card to drive the second beast, all expressly meant for... you guessed it... word processing and Internet surfing.

Myself: Wow. Maybe with that rig, they can get RealPlayer to work.

Tristram: Hey - let's not predict wildly here.

Myself: True, true. Speaking of, I wish Apple would release these Keynotes and other QuickTime goodies as downloadable files (for those of us with broadband). No matter what I try, they always look like crap.

Tristram: Same here. That WOULD be nice, yes....

Myself: Akamai servers, my butt. In other exciting news: I got x-rayed this morning, and after one of the shots, I hear the tech (behind the screen) say, "Oh, crap." File that under

Things You Don't Want To Hear.

It turned out his pen was out of ink.

Tristram: Most definitely! Do you think you'll make it?

Myself: If I use a different pen, yes.