This was originally published on July 1, 1995. By Craig W. Boyrsowich.

It certainly has not been a secret that International Business Machines has never had any faith in the personal computer. Even when it was first released in 1981, IBM felt that these machines would never overshadow the mainstream mainframe operations that IBM has always dominated. This would be only their first mistake.

The most basic PC in ‘81 would cost an average consumer $5000.00, which certainly didn't make Commodore and Apple nervous of loosing any market share.

Even though it was touted as being the revolution business was waiting for, IBM itself didn't buy in. It was created with old technology from Intel on the 8088/8086 processor, and a cryptic operating system produced by a then small basement operation known as Microsoft, although Bill Gates has not been seen sending any big thank you cards in IBM's direction. If IBM believed that the PC would become such a commodity then, as it is today, the industry would sure look different.

Abandoning the specifications of ISA to the public domain, IBM went on their merry way to release the AT computer among many sprouting competitors. The AT, based now on an Intel 80286 processor, was a service nightmare for IBM. Thousands of crashed CMS brand Hard Drives were dumped in the bay offshore from IBM's Boca Raton research centre by disgruntled customers.

The decline would continue with the release of IBM's PCjr. A novel concept in computing technology - design a hamstrung machine that expands like an AS/400. IBM would soon learn that their midrange concepts did not apply too well to the PC world (as infantile as it was). The concept of a cordless infra red keyboard was exciting enough if you liked to type at the proper angle to have the holes line up with the infra red receiver. This got harder as you moved further away from the machine. IBM's MCGA standard which was supported by maybe 3 or 4 software products and even found it's way into the windows operating system later on, never got recognized as an achievement. A full blown system would see the size of the box almost triple!  You could add side cars, top cars, even an undercar module. Of course, some could only be used if other modules were present, and even had to be stacked in a certain order which never seemed to get mentioned in the instructions or the advertising.

Now IBM had a surge of brilliance to redeem it's market from the Clones by releasing a brand new architecture know as MicroChannel. Again IBM applied it's mainframe background to design a more advanced architecture and forced us to look at the ugly blobs known and marketed as PS/2. But this architecture was closed and patented. The Cloners could not create a duplicate without paying licencing fees to Big Blue. Even third party add on manufacturers had to pay to produce upgrade cards for the MicroChannel architecture. This was a wonderful Idea other than they never took advantage of half of the great and exciting benefits in the MicroChannel architecture (not even with the OS/2 operating system!!). They also chose to use ESDI hard disk technology. This is after IDE was practically chosen as an industry standard for PC machines. With IDE on the Market, who wants a revamped MFM/RLL based hard disk?  The least they could have done if they were scrounging around for expensive non-standard equipment to justify charging the ridiculous prices, was to go with SCSI. SCSI was barely known to Macintosh users at this time. Even today the enormous benefits of MCA, and it's load balancing, and it's superior bandwidth continue to go untapped. The cloners were still smarter. They combated MCA with a new public standard which was EISA. That record didn't get much play either, though they proved time again that EISA could beat MCA hands down performing day to day tasks.

IBM gave the breath of life to the Monolith we call Microsoft today (sometimes Microsquish, Muckrosift, Microslop, etc.). Even when they had a chance to build a partnership to give IBM a share of the PC operating system market with OS/2, IBM blew that opportunity apart. They did however keep the rights to OS/2 and have managed to create more marketing literature, advertisements, brochures, and presentations than any other product marketed in history to achieve only a nominal amount of sales. And now IBM has it on the books to cancel the OS/2 operating system if major improvements in its market share are not seen soon. They are also trying to produce the Taligent operating system jointly with Apple Computer to run on the PowerPC Platform (but we won't see any of that until the end of ‘96). IBM originally released the PowerPC workstations in summer of ‘94 (as part of the Risc6000 family). In November of ‘94, it was said that they would hold back the release of their PC level PowerPCs until the availability of the PowerPC version of OS/2, which was called for Q1 ‘95. IBM really had egg on their faces when in late Q1, early Q2 ‘95, they released the higher end PC level PowerPC machines with no OS/2. The PowerPC version of OS/2 is now expected sometime in Q1 of ‘96. Apple ran away with the PowerPC market after moving close to 400,000 units in Q4 of ‘94. That is great for any PC manufacturer.
 

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