A $100 Billion Mistake by IBM

It was 1980, Chairman of IBM, Mr.Frank Carey was in a discussion with the company’s heads of the departments. IBM in those days produced only mainframe computers, but the revolutionary hike in the PC market created by the Apple II PC made IBM think out of their mainframes domain. Carey announced his decision of the company entering into the PC market. A man named Bill Lowe stood up and expressed his idea that rather than building PCs from the scratch, it would be easier and quicker way to build an assembled PC, which in IBMs language is said as open-architecture. Chairman Frank agreed.

Within a year, IBM designed the open-architectural PCs with it’s hardware, but it’s equally important counter part, the software, was still a question in their minds. So, IBM sat back and thought, whom should they buy the operating system from?? They had two options, one was Gary Kildel, then aged 39, a Computer Science Ph.D, inventor of the operating system CP/M and the other was a 24 year old Harvard drop-out, named Bill Gates. Gary was the hot cheese of operating systems and by 1980 Bill Gates’ small company Microsoft was already the biggest supplier of computer softwares in the industry.

IBM approached Bill Gates for asking him to write BASIC interpreter for IBM PC, and thought that Microsoft already owned an operating system, but Bill Gates made it clear to them that they don’t and sent them to Gary. But Gary Kildel and his wife Dorothy Kildel turned down the IBMs offer due to it’s many legal agreements. So, IBM, which never faced such refusals from anybody, turned back to Microsoft. Whenever Bill Gates is on the scene, there will be no second chance left to those who already lost one. So, they grabbed it all. But IBM needed a more faster working OS, and Microsoft didn’t have one, so they told IBM that they would bring it from Tim Patterson, who built an OS named QDOS which worked just as Gary Kildel’s CPM. Microsoft later made a deal with Seattle Computer Products(SCP) and became 86 DOS’s full owner, and delivered it to IBM but did not copyright it for them, and called it PC-DOS 1.0. Microsoft had the deal to supply many softwares needed for putting into it. And, that’s it, the IBM PC was ready.
   

                                     
IBM PC was released and became an instantaneous success, taking away half of the PC market share from that of Apple. People of corporate America and many others trusted the three letter word IBM than anything in those times. Everyone wanted only IBM PCs. In those three years, they’ve sold more than 2 Million PCs, and the future infront of them looked blissful for the Big Blue and it was blissful until some time down the line….!

It is in-built in the configuration of humanbeing, to have a look at something that everyone is looking at. This is very much true for the business world than as much it is for anything else in the universe. And this law has brought upon IBM something which it never even envisaged in it’s wildest imaginations: the ‘Reverse-Engineering’ by many other companies to build a PC that works exactly like the IBM PC. Reverse Engineering is a process of examining the working of a machine and building another that works exactly like the one which it is copied or say, cloned from. And the winner of the competition was COMPAQ.

Rod Canion and other founders of COMPAQ, in 1982, set themselves up for this mission. They sketched it all and came up with their version of the PC, which was a step-sibling of the IBM PC. The hereditary among them was so close that COMPAQ PC’s compatibilities were nothing more than those that suited the IBM’s. As for being exactly alike and less expensive compared to the IBM PC, COMPAQ had hit the million dollar jackpot in the first year of it’s release. And, there were many other companies who followed this reverse engineering methology and gave birth to various PCs, all of which were infact distantly-related to the IBM PC in the matter of compatibility of the softwares.

Now, let's do a bit of revision. When IBM bought the softwares for their PC from Microsoft, like DOS and BASIC, they told they’re never gonna pay the royalty for them. So, Bill Gates made a deal which made IBM unable to control Microsoft from licensing the softwares to other people. And the way history turned out, can be absolutely taken as a proof of this Harvard drop-out's smartness. He’d already foreseen the future, where there would be many companies building PCs compatible to IBM’s, and they all will be needing softwares that would work exactly as they do in the IBM PC. So, now what? Microsoft was the company that licensed the softwares needed for all those cloned machines to achieve compatibility as that of the IBM’s. And, also Intel made enormous profits by supplying Microprocessor chips to all those clone companies, just as it supplied for IBM PC.

So, IBM sat back in a swinging chair and retrospected, it had to somehow bring down the clone market as they were making it’s market share cripple very badly. They’ve come up with an idea of building a new operating system named OS/2. And, whom did IBM approach to build it? Microsoft, ofcourse. IBM always believed that Microsoft will stay close to the Big Blue. Microsoft agreed to write the code for OS/2. But, IBM saw that negotiations and contracts about OS/2 were more in favour of Microsoft than of themselves, and so it realized that it’s not gonna work out the way it was expected to. Now, there were business conflicts than just a mis-match of ideas.

Microsoft’s biggest market share came from DOS which every computer in the clone industry uses, and why would Microsoft now build something like OS/2 that would merely be a suicide bomber for the DOS in that clone market?

Microsoft started to build another operating system named Windows, that would work more efficiently and would be more user-friendly and a hell lot more than what DOS was, and it kept telling IBM that Windows and these graphical interfaces would be performing well in the future, and it even suggested IBM to take it as the operating system into their IBM PC. But, IBM didn’t come around on it. Then came the time when Microsoft had to choose between sticking to IBM and divorcing from it and standing by their own creation, Windows. And, Microsoft preferred the development of Windows to the partnership with IBM. And just like that, a 10 year old deal between IBM and Microsoft ended.

And, that was the first time in the history of mankind that a company had made a $100 Billion mistake. Yes, IBM didn’t credit the work done by Microsoft and let it go separate by disagreeing Windows to be used in it’s PC, which if done, would’ve changed away every line in the history of the Personal Computer industry.

When the time rolled on, IBM lost much of it’s PC market share in the industry. Eventually, it left the buildings deserted and moved back into it’s old home, the dominant Mainframe Computer company. And, Microsoft constructed their new buildings, and being a company that was 3000 times smaller than the IBM in 1980 had transformed to more than a $100 Billion company.

This account of some IBM’s bad decisions tells us the story of evolution of PC industry in the world. And, it also reflects the process of how the giant digital empires took shape, those that are now ruling this globe named planet Earth.

Written by:
KrishnaKanth (an NITian)

                      

An APPLE that day changed the World away...!

Those were the days when MITS ALTAIR 8800 mircocomputer was seeming insane inspite of its internal technical design which was the first of its kind. Hobbyists who work on it were sensing the difficulty in ‘on-off’ing the whole system of switches in order to make a calculation or perform any other kind of operation on it. And if by mistake a switch is mis-operated or a power failure occurs after clicking the required set of switches, then the user can only sit back and weep….. In the earlier days of Computers, it used to be such a difficult and tedious job instructing a machine, the interface is just made up of switches and LEDs in its front panel with which the user had to perform all kinds of operations that are required to be done.

Feels like quite unimaginable, isn’t it…???! Yes, it is.

In early 1970s, a duo of Steves, namely Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs wanted desperately to bring a change in the world of computer technology, they had already invented the ‘Apple I’ personal computer, which looked nothing more than just a mother board wrapped up in a specially designed wooden-box and put up a keyboard on the top of it. They were now in the line of introducing second version of their personal computer, the Apple II. The Apple II came with an external 5¼-inch floppy disk drive, the Disk II, attached through a controller card. The Disk II interface, created by Steve Wozniak, was regarded as an engineering masterpiece for its economy of electronic components in those days. The two Steves didn’t want their Apple II PC to just be another tech- hobbyists’ toy, rather they wanted it to be used by all the people, in their daily lives, so they looked up for something additional that would help it to be so.

And exactly at the very same point of time, there had been a creation called VisiCalc:

A student, named Dan Bricklin, of Harvard Bussiness School, was seated in the classroom, watching his professor lecturing on how to calculate the estimations and how to analyse the future fate of a company’s income by taking the profit/loss rate of the present and previous years of the company. It was to be done very carefully, as it’s not just mathematics but the prediction of a company’s future, a situation where one mistake would mean disaster. The student was feeling difficulty in performing the calculations as whenever a new investment rate adds-in, the entire process of calcutions has to be erased and re-done again. So, this student thought to put it all into an electronic spreadsheet and build a computer program which would do this ‘erase-all-and-redo’ work by itself and would give out the derived accurate result. So, he met his friend Robert Frankston who was a programmer and discussed the idea with him. After some months of hardwork on

the idea, they came up with a computer program called VisiCalc, which would do the business estimates and would help the people to count their stars before forwarding with an investment in the shares of a company, which many people would do day in and day out.

Apple creators, the two Steves had met Dan Bricklin and Robert Frankston, and all four agreed upon putting the VisiCalc into the Apple II computer.

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak participated in the ‘West Coast Computer Faire’ on April 16th 1977, displaying their Apple II infront of the whole world. The architechture built into the Apple II has mesmerized everyone in the exhibition and the VisiCalc had become the main attraction of the product.

That day, the Apple II had incarnated itself as a powerful business tool in the market. Apple II was the biggest commercial success and became the engine that shaked the world in those times.

Apple Inc. from then on went to make new revolutionary changes in the PC market.

Steve Jobs, once visited the Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Xerox Alto. The Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) had introduced the world’s first ever computer operating system with GUI (Graphical User Interface). It’s been a very distinctive invention. And Jobs was fascinated by the GUI of Xerox Alto and had forseen the future computer world that would depend entirely on GUIs. He then on strived to introduce the best GUI equipped commercial personal computer into the world. Apple Lisa was to be the next release by Apple, but unfortunately Steve Jobs was pushed out of the Lisa team due to some mishaps, and he took over the project of Macintosh. Lisa won the race by becoming the first PC with GUI to be introduced into the market but had become a commercial failure. Then in 1984 ‘Macintosh’ was released by Apple which went on to become a commercial revolution of the PC market, and was considered Apple’s masterpiece.

Since that day, Apple had changed the way people interacted with the computers. The idea taken up by the Apple computers to develop the graphical interface for the operating systems has brought in many revolutionary advances and had became the reason of today’s world with many finest operating system. The graphical interface for the computer users was the biggest thing that would ever happen in the field of personal computers. It then on went into every application and led all the programs and products to go gaga with the graphical interfaces. Many companies since those times, had believed that GUI is going to be a very big thing and started to restructure the operating system methodologies into a graphical form.

It didn’t ever stop anywhere in the history and is now being the most widely used interface for the computer operating systems.

One Apple in a very distant history, that fell on Newton’s head had changed the world in one way, and another Apple in these modern times of technology, that emerged in a garage of two friends had changed away the world yet again, as never imagined before.

Whatever may be the change, it all started with an ‘Apple’!

Written by:
Krishna Kanth
(a techNITian)

Early Evolution of Earth’s mightiest non-Humans:

In the early years of the eighteenth century, 1812,  a man in his early 20s was sitting in a room  just like on any other day and looking at a table of logarithms. He believed there would be many errors in them, and wanted to make out some way to calculate those logarithmic tables precisely. He always believed that it might be achieved by using a machine than by human hand. There were some mathematicians who were his colleagues, they too were trying to solve the tables by breaking down the operations to be performed on those logarithms between many computers (here ‘computer’ refers to a human who computes, just like a ‘driver’ refers to the human who drives, as there weren’t any electronic devices in those days) and these computing humans weren’t skilled much and were capable of performing only additions and subtractions. By observing this mass of people giving not-exact  trials everyday, the man thought ‘how would it be if these unskilled people can be replaced by a machinery which can perform many kinds of calculations with a highest rate of accuracy?’ .....  and that moment of time has changed the history of this world forever. That was the birth of an idea for the development of machines which can do mathematics accurately, and that man who had been the source of the idea was the person whom everyone in this present world of technology is aware of, and mainly those from Computer Science field would owe him forever, Charles Babbage.

Charles Babbage, the ‘father of computers’ is so called  as he had developed the ideas and models of machanical devices that  perform calculations, and those designs that he invented were very much similar to the modern computers which you, me and many billions around the world are now using. Similarities like the separation of data and program memories, operations being instruction based, machines having separate I/O unit, etc., are quite the same in the present day computers.  His designs had made many scientists around the world to start thinking of the subsequent developments that can be implemented on those designs without which you wouldn’t be reading this document in a computer. Charles Babbage, since being dawned on with the idea, had started to develop a machine called Difference Engine which had really made the difference in the earliest world of computer technology by making the computations of  polynomial functions, calculate series of similar values by using the method of finite differences.  His machines were among the first mechanical computers of this world to be ever emerged.

After the development of the Difference  Engine had worn out, he then started to design another, this time a more complex machine called Analytical Engine. It was not a single physical machine, but a sequence of different designs. He worked on the development of that machine until his death. The Analytical Engine includes sequential control, branching, looping and have been the first mechanical device to be Turing-complete.

Ada Lovelace was one of the very few people who completely understood the Babbage’s ideas, and had been the first one to write a program for the Analytical Engine, has become the World’s first programmer ever. In 1979, a comtemporary programming language as an honour had been named after her, Ada.

After Charles was dead, his designs were undertaken by London Science Museum, there many scientists have worked for a very long time span of some years and brought a personified form to Charles’ designs of both the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine.

Those discoveries in the early days of the computer technology’s development taken up by an infinite number of scientists for further revolutionary improvements had been resulted in the world that we are now living in this present day. These were the people who had been the reasons of our human world’s invaluable development in every possible field of technology and redefinition of the lives of many people around the world..!!

I wonder how the idea of making machines work for humans had entered into Charles’ mind that day, but we all should be very thankful that it happened, else our human imagination would quickly runout of thoughts to have a picture of how our world would be like without any of the present techonoligical miracles and wonders that we are now witnessing.

One thing is precise, ‘Computer’ has been the only son in the world who is claimed of being wanted to be the child of many fathers(scientists) in this world,  but it all went into Charles Babbage...!!! God bless his soul. Thank Him very much, for he changed our lives forever...!!!

P.S: Here is an exclusive photograph to you  all. The very SOURCE that had been the birth place of the ideas that we just looked into,  the very corner stone of the revolutionary and ground breaking changes that took place in the world, the source is the brain of Charles Babbage:

 Written by:

Krishna Kanth

(an 'NIT'ian)