IBM PC, every mention
20 scenes · ← back to IBM PC
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 12Ben Gilbert 5Hamilton Helmer 2
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where IBM PC comes up
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 35:52 David Rosenthal The internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:55:36 David Rosenthal Now, before we talk about the clones, this is really just a footnote because, of course, all the incentives are aligned for IBM to push DOS as the operating system for the PC.
- ▶ 1:55:53 David Rosenthal When they launch the PC,
- ▶ 1:55:56 David Rosenthal Customers actually have a choice of which operating system they want on their IBM PC.
- ▶ 1:56:23 David Rosenthal And the price sheet for the operating system option is Pascal is an extra 450 dollars with your IBM PC.
- ▶ 1:56:32 David Rosenthal CPM is an extra 175 dollars with your IBM PC.
- ▶ 1:56:37 David Rosenthal And DOS, which was developed specifically for the PC, is the best way to run it, is only 60 dollars.
- ▶ 1:56:49 David Rosenthal Their hardware for the PC by selling DOS, because they don't have to pay Microsoft any of that, and they've set up the incentives that, like, obviously everybody's gonna choose DOS.
- ▶ 1:56:58 Ben Gilbert To give them a little bit more credit, too, they did try to enforce that there's some amount of lock-in to the IBM PC, and they did that in two ways.
- ▶ 1:58:05 Ben Gilbert So, Compaq was formed basically to clone the IBM PC.
- ▶ 1:59:38 Ben Gilbert They basically figured out how to exactly clone the IBM PC and buy the very same operating system, and to go back to quoting Ben Thompson, because this is from his great piece again, the result was a company that came to dominate the…
- ▶ 2:00:28 David Rosenthal And then the IBM PC comes out at the end of 1981 and they're like,
- ▶ 2:00:40 David Rosenthal They start the company in 1982, and within the first year, they do a hundred and eleven million dollars of revenue of selling IBM PC clone hardware.
- ▶ 2:00:53 Ben Gilbert Like, basically, this is the IBM PC, but for less money?
- ▶ 2:03:25 David Rosenthal So meanwhile, in the computing industry background, while all this is going on with the launch of the IBM PC and then the clones,
- ▶ 2:23:24 David Rosenthal And that's what Lotus one, two, three did with the spreadsheet on the IBM PC and IBM compatible PC.
- ▶ 2:27:27 unnamed speaker We can't compete with Lotus on the IBM PC, so we're gonna shelve Multiplan and kind of start over, and Excel is gonna come out in the graphical user interface, and we're gonna try to be first and best on the GUI.
- ▶ 2:32:10 Ben Gilbert The whole marketing message is Excel on a Mac is better than Lotus one, two, three on a PC.
Platforms and Power (with Hamilton Helmer and Chenyi Shi) · Acquired
- ▶ 42:01 Hamilton Helmer But you needed to have superior scale and get everybody signed up to have that work, and the Mac three was such a complete flub that it made it possible for the IBM PC to just take over the world, basically.
- ▶ 42:17 Hamilton Helmer Well, of course, the IBM PC didn't have power either, and so that ended up being a long-term not that attractive a business.