🚀 go-pugleaf

re:
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2018c.html#15 Old word processors

hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com writes:
> It's sad to read of intra-department squabbles at IBM, but it
> seems from the IBM Early Computer history that this is nothing
> new.  Back in the early 1950s there was rivalry between the
> Endicott and Poughkeepsie labs.  The S/360 development had a
> lot of sharp differences of opinion on the direction to go.

I've told the story before about the Gov. antitrust (turns out one of
the IBM people at the science center had relative that was MIT
economist(?) that was at the trial) ... where various members of the
bunch all testified that by the end of the 50s, all computer companies
knew that the single most important customer requirement was compatible
computer line (beginning of rapid growth in computer use ... so
projecting lots of upgrading) ... and only IBM top executives managed to
enforce it (none of the top executives at bunch managed to force plant
managers for various product lines to toe the line) ... compatible
product line was more important than features for any particular model.

in the wake of failure FS
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/submain.html#futuresys
there was mad rush to get stuff back into product pipelines,
3033 & 3081 kicked off in parallel
http://www.jfsowa.com/computer/memo125.htm
3033 started out 168-3 logic mapped to 20% faster chips.

4341 (endicott) came out in 1979, a little after 3033 (POK) ... but
cluster of 4341s was much cheaper than 3033, much more powerful
aggregate computing, much less aggregate footprint and
environmentals. Head of POK was apparently so threatened that at one
point managed to get allocation for critical 4341 manufacturing
component cut in half.

then there is my oft repeated tale about late 80s, a senior disk
engineer got a talk scheduled at internal, world-wide, annual,
communication group conference ... supposedly on 3174 performance
... however he opened his talk with the statement that the head of the
communication group was going to be responsible for the demise of the
disk division. The issue was that the communication group had
stranglehold on datacenters with corporate strategic ownership of
everything that crossed datacenter walls and were fiercely fighting off
distributed computing and client/server, trying to preserve their dumb
terminal paradigm and install base. The disk division was seeing data
fleeing datacenters to more distributed computing friendly platforms
with fall in disk sales. The disk division had come up with a number of
solution to address the opportunity, but they were constantly being
vetoed by the communication group. The mainframe datacenter stranglehold
wasn't just affecting disk sales and a few years later the company goes
into the red.

-- 
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970