[ NNSquad ] Re: IBM PC @ 30: Original review of the Personal Computer Model 5150

[Tilghman Lesher <tilghman@meg.abyt.es>]

On Friday 12 August 2011 14:13:12 Bob Frankston wrote:
> Let's be careful here ... yes, IBM published the BIOS listings but it
> was in lieu of any other documentation. But it's unfair to say Apple
> was closed because Apple didn't have an equivalent to the BIOS.
> 
> IBM didn't publish the listings of DOS any more than Apple published the
> listings for its Basic interpreters and file system, Actually we
> could've gotten the file system listings under NDA but I just reversed
> engineered Woz's very clever disk file system to avoid being dependent
> upon Apple's approval.
> 
> IBM was very much trying to follow Apple's pattern of openness including
> encourage third parties to build board to add in.
> 
>    [ I believe that history pretty much shows the real results.
>      IBM (whether enthusiastically or not) ended up allowing the PC
>      clone business to flourish, while Apple has (successfully, I
> believe) managed to kill every significant Mac clone attempt that came
> down the pipe, and that might have created cost savings to consumers of
> the sort that have perpetually given PC-based systems a significant
> bang-for-the-buck advantage over Apple systems.  This isn't to say that
> Macs aren't fine products, just that in my opinion they've *always*
> been significantly overpriced, and that can be traced pretty clearly to
> the lack of clone competition.

At the time, IBM's competition was the Apple II, and Apple published
the source to, originally, Monitor ROM, and later, Autostart ROM.
Macintosh came much later, and it's worth noting that at the time of the
Apple II, it dominated in terms of total available software titles,
compared to IBM.  Later, Apple, with the Macintosh, published their
public API (the Toolbox, as it was known then), without need for NDA.

The missteps in the late 80s and early 90s for Apple came largely in the
form of getting rid of their top engineer, Steve Jobs, and replacing his
leadership with somebody who knew soda pop, but not computers.  One
needs only look at the current market cap of Apple, after the return of
Steve Jobs, to see that the price of the hardware plays a very minor role
compared to total user experience.

And before you dismiss my comments as a Mac fanboy, please consider that
I am writing this email on Ubuntu Linux running on Dell hardware, which is
my primary workstation.

-- 
Tilghman