Disruptive Technology
As a person who was actulay involved in the industry at that time I have doubts IBM had any real intention of supporting MP/M on the PC (Piece of Crap) .
In the late 70's, before the PC there was the didicated Word Processor. I worked for AES DATA in Mississauga as test enginer kepping the production line humming. I made the first CP/M bios for that system.
Shortly after that I was hired by a startup developing a S100 based system. We had 128K banked memory system workin ( never finished debugging the 256K model )and a 5M hard drive, running MP/M with 4 dumb terminals.
Imaging my amazement when the PC (Piece of Crap) was first introuduced with 16K of RAM and a puking cassettre tape drive to so much fanfare and hype, destroying the actulal inivations going on in the microprocessor market.
The startup ran out of funding. I showed up for work one day to find the doors locked and me stiffed for 3 moths salary.
MP/M had the possibility of crashing the minicomputer market margins. The whole purpose of the PC(Piece of Crap) was to prevent that from happening. IMHO
Biting the hand that feeds IT
