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Don Estridge: A misfit who built the IBM PC

259 点作者 dshipper11 个月前

21 条评论

tromp11 个月前
It&#x27;s rare that a tech story brings me to tears, but I couldn&#x27;t help feel one swelling up when reading the final paragraphs.<p>&gt; Eventually, it was Wilkie who made the first move. Overwhelmed with emotion, his eyes red and swollen with grief, he stepped forward and detached the red rosette from the lapel of his suit jacket. It was the same one Don had given him years before. Leaning down, he gently placed the rosette on the casket.<p>It feels like there should be a movie made about this story...
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figers11 个月前
For people who are interested in this era, read Fire in the valley, I have never read a book so fast in college, a great read!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Fire-Valley-Making-Personal-Computer&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0071358927" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Fire-Valley-Making-Personal-Computer&#x2F;...</a>
phkahler11 个月前
&gt;&gt; His divisional heads always had the same answer. Microcomputers—home computing—were a fad. They were low-cost and low-profit. Let others scrabble around in the metaphorical dirt of home computing. The real money was in the markets that IBM’s divisions already dominated—selling vast mainframes and minicomputer systems to large businesses. Cary was even told to buy Atari, which by then had established itself as America’s home video game system of choice. That’s all home computers were good for: gaming.<p>This attitude was so short sighted. A friend of mines dad was using their Apple II for work-related spreadsheets and thought it was the greatest this ever. Not sure how IBM folks could not see this opportunity just because it was smaller scale than &quot;what they did&quot;. 20 years later Intel seemed to have missed the mobile market due to a similar attitude.
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dreamcompiler11 个月前
I was living in Texas at the time of Flight 191. I was no fan of the IBM PC but it was still gut-wrenching to hear that the father of the machine had been killed.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Delta_Air_Lines_Flight_191" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Delta_Air_Lines_Flight_191</a><p>This was the crash that brought the term &quot;microburst&quot; into the national consciousness.
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nedrylandJP11 个月前
There is a &quot;high tech middle school&quot; with his namesake in Boca Raton, FL, next to the former 1960s IBM R&amp;D complex.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palmbeachschools.org&#x2F;DonEstridgeMiddle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palmbeachschools.org&#x2F;DonEstridgeMiddle</a>
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AlbertCory11 个月前
One consistent theme you get from business history is:<p>There is very little penalty for being wrong. There is often a <i>huge</i> penalty for being right, if the powers-that-be opposed you.
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yardie11 个月前
I grew up in South Florida in the 80s and 90s. I was familiar with the IBM office in Boca Raton, nicknamed T-Rex, and had a few school friends who worked at IBM on the IBM PC. From what I can remember, the Boca campus was like garden leave. IBM sent you there when they didn&#x27;t want you but couldn&#x27;t fire you. So it was full of IBM misfits who were thrown out of HQ. I never made the connection to Flight 191, and assumed it was because of Hurricane Andrew. But once the PC market took off IBM wanted that team brought back into the veil. A lot of my friends moved to Cary, NC, more famously known as Research Triangle.<p>Miami, and South Florida overall, is kind of a crazy place to be. Every couple of decades people out west or from up north rediscover we actually exist. There are good engineers here but the West and Northeast have loads of money. So once CS&#x2F;SWE really took off as a career the companies down here couldn&#x27;t&#x2F;wouldn&#x27;t compete. Trust me, if you were an Asian&#x2F;Indian kid in Florida in the 90s and told your parents you wanted to work in software they were going to beat some sense into you.<p>I&#x27;ve watched money flood into the area and then get carried back out when the financial tides changed. I always imagined Miami could have been kind of like a Silicon Valley but the politics, money, geography will work against it.
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nabla911 个月前
Classic example of Worse is Better.<p>All competing architectures were better than IBM PC architecture, PC BIOS was bad, chosen processor instruction set was the worst, MS-DOS operating system was bad. Only the keyboard was good.<p>What made it winner was open architecture, 80-column screen and IBM name.
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deater11 个月前
I&#x27;m a bit curious about this part of the article:<p>&gt; Unlike all of its major rivals—including the Apple II—the IBM PC was built &gt; with an open architecture.<p>The Apple II, designed by Woz, is famously open, to the point the original model came with full schematics and ROM listings which made it trivially cloneable. I&#x27;m curious why this isn&#x27;t considered an open architecture.
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KerrAvon11 个月前
This part is factually incorrect:<p>&gt; The easiest way to set that standard wasn’t just to sell machines; it was to let other companies sell parts, software, and even whole computers that would be compatible with your machine. Unlike all of its major rivals—including the Apple II—the IBM PC was built with an open architecture.<p>The Apple II was effectively as open as the PC. And IBM didn&#x27;t want clones any more than Apple did. Both the Apple II and the PC were eventually legally cloned, and neither company could do anything about it.
ghaff11 个月前
It might make an interesting business book--maybe I&#x27;ll write it--what realistic business strategies companies that are widely viewed as failures could have followed though industry changes that boards&#x2F;shareholders wouldn&#x27;t have revolted about.<p>I&#x27;m not even sure IBM is a great example. It had a really rough stretch but is still there as a very profitable dividend-paying large corporation even if it&#x27;s not considered cool.
kennethrc11 个月前
&gt; &quot;The system would do two things. It would draw an absolutely beautiful picture of a nude lady, ...&quot;<p>Lena? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lenna" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lenna</a>)
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jes519911 个月前
there’s a sense in which IBM was right to fear the PC - it, in fact, killed their main industry, and they were not able to compete well in the new space, despite defining the standard. maybe they could have pursued it more enthusiastically and done better in the 1990s, but, it still would have been fighting against the tide
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drumdance11 个月前
In 1981 my sister was just out of college and worked on the PC as her first job. She said the loss of Estridge was devastating, and IBM changed some of their policies around executives traveling together because of it.
doubloon11 个月前
well in the long run the naysayers were right. the personal PC business is strewn with dead companies scrounging for pennies. it is basically a loss leader. FAANG - which one of those make PCs? oh right, none of them except Apple which has like a 1 percent PC market share which is used to make apps and videos for phones.<p>my favorite screwdriver shop (PC parts, cases, cpus, fans, etc) just closed. one of the last in the city. decline in business.
forgotmypw1711 个月前
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;4MbcF" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;4MbcF</a>
zabzonk11 个月前
i believe that estridge was being head-hunted at apple as ceo before they eventually hired scully. sad thing is that if they had hired him, he might even be alive today, but he preferred to stay at big blue.
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djmips11 个月前
A lot of the time, I really am turned off by these articles in short story form but this one flows well. Good job author!
labrador11 个月前
The end of this article is so beautifully written it made me tear up
mellosouls11 个月前
For people who are interested in this era, <i>Halt and Catch Fire</i> is a terrific portrayal of the sorts of characters and battles that defined it, albeit from more of a startup perspective.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pWrioRji60A" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=pWrioRji60A</a>
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aspenmayer11 个月前
This is the first time I&#x27;ve heard someone refer to DEC as &quot;Digital.&quot; Is that an Australian quirk? Not that it&#x27;s wrong, as it is part of the name and could likely be a regional expression and&#x2F;or historically accurate, and in any case it&#x27;s before my time in the industry.<p>&gt; but was yet to announce he was gay (took another decade)<p>I don&#x27;t know why this detail was included; not that it&#x27;s anything to be ashamed of. It just doesn&#x27;t seem relevant at all to the other points you have raised, and seems a bit insensitive or judgemental imo.
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