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that made it difficult for customers to mix them with those of other vendors. In the
1960s, IBM's competitors, the so-called ȒSeven DwarfsȓȌGE, RCA, Univac,
Honeywell, Burroughs, Control Data, and NCRȌfell on hard times. Some went out
of the computer business altogether, while others tried unsuccessfully t
o combine
their strengths by merging their computer operations. It was generally
predicted that
they would eventually all fail. It was in this atmosphere that the U.S. government
brought an antitrust suit against IBM in 1969. The suit went to trial in 1975 and
dragged on until 1982, when the Reagan Administration abandoned it, declaring it
Ȓwithout meritȓ.
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57
A Mainframe Computer
Of course, by then the computing landscape had changed completely. Just as the
dinosaurs gave way to smaller, nimbler creatures, three new waves of computers
had appeared: the minicomputers, workstations, and microcomputers, all
engineered by new companies, not the Seven Dwarfs. Today, the importance of
