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On Thu, 29 Oct 2015 21:37:50 -0400,
wrote:

On Thu, 29 Oct 2015 20:19:02 -0400, wrote:

If we had not broken up the phone company we would not have an
internet and if that shot was not fired across IBM's bow we would not
have the PC as we know it.

===

The old Bell System phone companies fought successfull for years to
keep other devices from attaching to their wires. Those were the days
when a 1200 baud modem was considered high speed and cost over a
thousand dollars. Only the most visionary could concieve of an
internet like structure even though a lot of the technology came out
of Bell Labs.

The problem was that without the breaking up of Ma Bell, Hayes would
have never been able to sell a cheap modem to the public.

IBM was not forced into the PC business by the threat of anti trust
however.

The anti trust threat assured the PC was open architecture hardware
and unbundled software. Without everything would be like Apple and
innovation would have stopped with the Lisa.

That threat had far more impact on mainframe hardware and
software. IBM's PC was more of a response to the possible loss of
account control posed by the Apple II computer and the VisiCalc
spreadsheet application.

You are right
Visicalc was on the PC-1 (1980) and was the first killer app for
business PCs. It did not take long to push Apple out of the way in
offices because the open architecture hardware and software made
innovation blossom

IBM marketing reps were walking into
customer offices, seeing the proliferation of Apple 2s, spreadsheets,
word processors, etc., and recognizing the threat to their business
model and customer relationships. In the end they lost that segment
of the business anyway but not before the Intel/Microsoft platform had
become an industry standard.

The big difference was IBM was selling integrated systems where your
desktop PC was connected to your mainframe.