RIP Bill Lowe: Father of the IBM PC no longer reading drive C William (Bill) C. Lowe, the IBM manager who broke through Big Blue's corporate structure to build its first personal computer (and inadvertently made Microsoft the industry's powerhouse) has died at the age of 72 after a heart attack. Lowe joined IBM in 1962 and swiftly rose through the ranks to become lab director at the …
I've considered all the possibilities and I think: we'd have missed out on Clippy.
Snide remarks aside, respects to Bill Lowe. How many of us can claim to be be so sure in our belief about where the future lies as to overcome the inertia of a company like IBM and shape it ourselves?
"Seeing an opportunity, Gates said Microsoft could supply IBM with the operating systems it needed. The only problem was Microsoft didn’t have a working operating system, so it went to Seattle Computer Products, which had just written one called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System), bought it for $50,000 and renamed it MS-DOS"
Are you sure there wasn't an unknown man with a rifle atop Dallas' Grassy Knoll or frustrated former painter named Hitler involved? :)
(Tux--because as IBM found out, there is never a penguin around when you REALLY need one.)
Why on earth are you bothering to go AC on a "whinge at a journo" post? I'm sure the reg can work out how you are if they care, and I can't imagine any one else being bothered about your little whine, unless of course there's someone out there wanting to spam people with offers to buy cheese...
Sadly, monsewer AC, I have to agree. Unfortunately El Reg has recently become, with the exception of Andrew's articles (Not all - don't get cocky now), just a clickbait aggregator. There's precious little original work.
We understand your need for ad revenue, but please don't take the piss.
The IBM AT PC is the granddaddy of all modern PCs today. Especially the 2nd generation ones which, had SLOTS! and assignable interrupts and motherboards you could PLUG things into!, basically showed that a PC with built in expansion and modification features was what people wanted.
But man I hated IRQs and modem scripts and COM port swaps and LPT1 & 2 and then flaky ATAPI drivers and dip switches and ini and config, files, but it taught me a lot and eventually, I finally figured it all out.
Godspeed, Mr. Lowe.
"Especially the 2nd generation ones which, had SLOTS!"
Pardon? The 5150 had slots. It also had a PSU that was almost big enough to power the devices(*) in them, and certainly couldn't cope with a hard disk. That had to wait 18 months for the 5160 (PC/XT), which was otherwise much like the 5150.
The original AT (the 5170) came even later.
(*) Devices? What devices? Graphics card ("display adapter", up to two), serial and parallel ports, floppy controller, that sort of stuff. None of it was on the 5150's motherboard, except the keyboard and cassette port connectors.
Yeah I remember those days. I didn't mind too much when they put the serial and comm port on the MB, but when they added the graphics chip I do remember thinking "Great, now I'll have to replace the whole fricking MB if the graphics card goes." For the most part these days the only guys looking for a slot for a graphics card are hardcore gamers and CAD/CAM folks.
IBM assumed that the PC couldn't be cloned without a license, this because the cloners would have to use IBMs copyrighted BIOS. They didn't figure that a third party would clean-room the BIOS and Columbia Computer Products produced the first independent IBM PC compatible clone. Compaq and the rest soon followed. Microsoft having got IBM to sign a NON-EXCLUSIVE LICENSE was more than happy to sell DOS licenses to them. Subsequently IBM tried-and-failed to claw back control of the IBM-PC industry with OS/2. They hired on Microsoft to write the code, but Gates had them work on Windows NT instead. Subsequently IBM sold their PC business to Lenovo.
"IBM recognizes thet MS will be licensing the MS Product Offering 1.1 to thind parties"
http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/0000/PX00004.pdf
"IBM never knew our plan and if they did they shouldnt like it - our old plan (DOS) which is the current financial sucess of the company - sell cheap to IBM and make money from everyone else"
http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/0000/PX00135.pdf
"You never sent me a response on what things an app would do that would make it run with MS-DOS and not run with DR-DOS"
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/05/03/more_gates_smoking_emails_support/
http://www.courts.state.mn.us/districts/fourth/MicrosoftTrial/Plaintiff/PLEX0874_0001.TIF
Choosing Intel was another big mistake.
They didn't stick to one supplier. You will see lots of 5150's with an AMD CPU, and even NEC. In fact, not sticking with one supplier was a smart move.
You should read the book "Inside Intel", a very interesting and well written book, And 5150 is a Intel processor and AMD is a competitor to Intel with a Intel instruction set.
That's probably a fine book, however the 5150 is the model number of the IBM PC. The IBM PC came with mostly Intel CPUs indeed and all three of the motherboards in my own collection have Intel (I just checked), however AMD was a licensed second source for the 8088 processor. IBM would not use components unless they had a second source. There is no denying that there are machines around with AMD processors. A quick Google finds this one.
"Choosing Intel was another big mistake."
In hindsight.
People forget the originalPC was a 16 bit inside the processor, 8 bit outside, so they could use lots of 8 bit I/O chips as COTS parts.
I don't think Zilog had a 16 bitter chip at that time, Western Digital 16 bit follow up to the 6502 did not turn up int he Apple IIGS till 1987 (manual chip design. Uggh).
The best of them was the Motorola 68000 but I don't know if the 68008 (16, or even 32 bits internally, 8 bit bus) was out then or if Motorola was going with the 16 bit bus version only at that time.
If Motorola had an 8 bit version out a)It could not have run CP/M (as only Intel and Zilog processors could and that was a sort of backup plan) b)Software development would have been a very different environment.
Corporate types like having a plan b a lot.
We had all the computers running around at the time that El Reg has discussed in "This Old Box", and even though the reviews were mostly "meh" they also did say "... but it's IBM" and everybody went batshit about that fact. Even though the Apple was about the same at meeting a business' needs, everybody I knew bought one "because it was an IBM"
The amount of power and reputation that IBM had in computers isn't something you can really get across to folks nowadays.
Godspeed, Mr. Lowe.
IBM produced a standard and oh, well, I have seen articles claiming that Jobs created the micro computer (PC) and sometimes that Gates created it. IBM was a late comer but the fact that PS's where produced by so many companies made the difference together with Windows, very soon.
Would an IBM only PC really have benefited IBM?
There wouldn't have been a PC software market, and certainly not Windows if IBM had kept it an IBM only product.
It's like claiming that if Mercedes had been the only one building cars all cars today would be MB - in fact there just wouldn't be cars today.
Back in the 80's, I was fixing IBM pc's and learning about MS-Dos....
I guess that's why I'm still fixing them today, in some respect
Recently had a problem with a very old PC, MS-Dos 6.22 I think, could I find any disks to reload it?
and where do you get an antique copy of some spreadsheet s/w (can't remember the name off hand)
But a quick post to freecycle and all the disks magically turned up
Getting it to run on a 'newer' PC was another problem as the IBM P/S2 had completely fried itself.
Godspeed, Mr. Lowe.
but there is a contradictory story about the rise of PC-DOS. According to the 1996 documentary Triumph of the Nerds, which featured interviews with most of the principals, when Gates was first approached, he told IBM to talk to Scott MacNealy. When that worthy failed to respond, they went back to Gates, who agreed [insert QDOS story here]. However, when presented with the massive IBM contract, he threw it in the trash, preferring his own simpler one that made Microsoft the powerhouse it became. (As I remember, Bill Gates, Sr. is a lawyer...)
I, not having been there, do not know which is true.
That were introduced with the first 5150 PCs. Of course they were later augmented by the AT's design as well.
These have their roots in IBMs design of the IBM1130 (the same team did both designs). On that machine the interrupts were dedicated and "really strange" (been there, done that!). I'm sure that commentators here could enumerate the flubs, but a few are:
Interrupts
Slot 8 (on the XT)
Using the 8088
Microsoft
8 bit data bus
640k (ought to be enough...)
Keyboard (on the XT/PC). Improved a bit on the AT. Then having weird keycodes for dedicated keys (Insert, Home, Delete, End, PageUp, PageDown, etc.)
Ctrl-Alt-Delete (maybe, maybe not).
(Add yours here)
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