Two Stop Bits | I think, it was really an odd choice to do this: Out of the box, it was really j...

masswerk 8 days ago | parent

I think, it was really an odd choice to do this: Out of the box, it was really just a home computer with BASIC in ROM and a cassette port. But, clearly, it was also way too expensive for this. (The original sales flyer had an image of a happy family with the kid playing a space game on the home TV. It may be interesting to know how many tens of units IBM actually sold in this configuration and for that particular use in total.)

It was more of a base, you could build an actual system on, and, as it even lacked a serial port, you couldn't even run the simplest control tasks out of the box. It was more of what could be called a "smart backplane". (This is probably ok, if your IBM sales person comes to your office to make a custom bundle for your needs – and while no dime will be spent on an unused component, it will probably be still expensive –, but it makes it particularly hard to sell this in any other way. Which gave rise to all those local PC bundling & packaging shops at the corner.)

I'm sure, much consideration had gone into the concept, and there's probably some prehistory to this (as IBM had several projects for a home or personal computer in the second half of the 1970s, neither of saw the light of day.) Or was it just about showing the flag, like, "well, theoretically, we have a machine that could do all this, so please shut up (and we'll be happy to sell 1000 units of this PoC.)"? But the IBM PC is that taken for granted that it is (un)surprisingly hard to come by any on its background.

(Of course, an LLM won't tell us any about what may be actually interesting about this.)

glhaynes 7 days ago
I imagine it's some combination of IBM having no experience marketing to home users and wanting to be able to have a low "starting price".
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- masswerk 7 days ago
  There may be some to this.
  But I'm not entirely convinced that IBM just didn't know how to do this. E.g., there's the Aquarius concept (1977), which had progressed to working production prototypes, which would have come attractively packaged and with an app store based on bubble memory cards. (Apparently, this was canceled over concerns regarding the reliability of those bubble memory cards.) As a marketing concept, this would have been about 25–30 years ahead of its time – and it would have separated this neatly from any other IBM business. However, any such elaborate concept would probably have struggled in an organisation like this, where any move may endanger what has already been secured.
  Maybe, the remarkable lack of context of the IBM 5150 was its internal selling point?
  (Imaginary internal sales pitch: "See, this machine has no specs. We won't even say what it's for. We'll just tell them, the Little Tramp likes it, so you like it, too. No, it won't eat into mainframes.")
  *) More about the IBM Aquarius (including photos) can be found in Paul Atkinson's book "Delete. A Design History of Computer Vapourware", Bloomsbury, 2013.
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  - bmonkey325 6 days ago
    The mainframe division did all kinds of meddling to avoid canibalizing mainframe and AS400 sales. The coffee pot story about a coffee pot inside a "microsoft confidential" box during the OS/2 days was IBM not being able to get out of its way...
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bmonkey325 8 days ago
Small world. A LOL for you - I used a PS/2 Model 50 for RT data aquisition in the late 80s - doing RT DSP of signal analysis off a bio-amp. Northgate and Gateway had non conforming DMA that the IBM implemented correctly.
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bmonkey325 8 days ago
I think what Jerry Pournelle always said in his Chaos Manner column was true then and is still true today: “The computer you want always costs $5000.”
RPi I think lives this ethos today (not by cost) but you can get a SBC which is just a basic compute unit and add on custom stuff to get to a solution - wifi, nvme storage, solder and smoke and wiring goodness. Despite the linux complexity - its about as close to a retro experience as you can get today.
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- masswerk 8 days ago
  I'm still curious, what this machine was meant to be. One version is that it was about something that would enable small local tasks, like data entry, editing, etc., but would require some kind of IBM mainframe for any serious task, like actually processing or managing this data. Much like the IBM 3270 PC. (So, really a front door to renting out mid-sized machines?) But in this conception, the PC would have soon been superceded by the XT running Lotus 1-2-3 and its storage capabilities, and finally dead by the advent of the 386 machines, which were perfectly able to run all of this locally. Are the latter even PCs, conceptionally, or were they something new, but still something, people could envision in the original PC (and maybe had expected from it, all along)?
  PS: One of the things, I kind of don't get, is this entire approach to acquiring an office PC, of going around, like, "no this person doesn't need a floppy drive, this person doesn't need a printer either, no parallel port for them, this person may need 256 KB more, so give them at least 128 KB, well, this one requires at least a screen, etc." I don't think that this was what customers expected deploying PCs to the office would look like, involving an entire requirements committee, fearful of spending either too little or too much. It would have been much easier and probably also cheaper (for all parties involved) and certainly more attractive to come up with just a few standard configurations and load this off onto everybody's desks, like an actual product. (Much like it was with the PS/2. But, then, IBM wasn't really into selling products.) – On the other hand, admittedly, it made the IBM PC specs-wise a moving target, when it came to any competition.
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