Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!unisoft!gethen!farren
From: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Horizontal pipelining [really: multi-tasking is alive and well]
Message-ID: <493@gethen.UUCP>
Date: 30 Dec 87 22:11:10 GMT
References: <201@PT.CS.CMU.EDU> <388@sdcjove.CAM.UNISYS.COM> <988@edge.UUCP> <1062@winchester.UUCP> <1314@sugar.UUCP>
Reply-To: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Organization: There's Unix there in Oakland
Lines: 37

In article <1314@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:
>I'd say that the reason [for the dominance of single-tasking PC systems]
>was that IBM dived into the market with a machine that was at most a
>slight improvement over existing single-tasking systems just as
>multitasking CP/M derivitives (MP/M, CP/M 3.x) and reasonable micro-based
>UNIX boxes (Onyx, etc...) were just getting into the water. IBM's entry swamped
>them and they never came up again. The industry is just now beginning to
>recover from the advent of the IBM-PC.

I would think that it was much more the fact that, for the first time,
the corporate users had a machine from a company that they knew (IBM),
and which wasn't so complex as to overwhelm the first-time computer
users.  The IBM PC was, IMHO, a significant improvement over the boxes
available at the time, which, for business, tended to be CP/M systems
put together by relatively unreliable and unsupportive houses such
as Godbout or Morrow.  When the corporate types saw a machine which
would meet their small computer needs, with the full corporate clout
of IBM behind them, they went for it full bore.

Just now beginning to recover from the advent of the IBM PC?  I'd 
rather think that it was the IBM PC, warts and all, which opened the
door to corporate computing for small computers.  Once the users gained
sufficient ease with the whole idea of computing, a concept which very
few of them had ever been exposed to before, the possibility of more
powerful systems, with more powerful operating systems, became something
they were willing (and, in many cases, ready) to consider.  You have to
crawl before you can walk, and I think the IBM PC made a pretty good
set of training wheels.  Of course, one must cast aside one's training
wheels sometime, and I think that the majority of business computer
users are rapidly approaching the point where a stock IBM with MS-DOS
will no longer do the jobs they need to have done.

-- 
Michael J. Farren             | "INVESTIGATE your point of view, don't just 
{ucbvax, uunet, hoptoad}!     | dogmatize it!  Reflect on it and re-evaluate
        unisoft!gethen!farren | it.  You may want to change your mind someday."
gethen!farren@lll-winken.llnl.gov ----- Tom Reingold, from alt.flame