Introduction - Computer Busses - page 45

So was/is the IBM PC a success? Of course it was/is. But, for IBM it has been a double-
edged sword. It opened up a new and exciting market, and made the company operate in
ways that would have never been possible before. Before the IBM PC, their systems sold by
themselves, because they were made by IBM. It also considerably reduced their market
share. Many questions remained unanswered: 'Would it have been accepted in the same way
if it had been a closed system, which had to be licensed from IBM?' 'Would it have been ac-
cepted if it had used IBM components rather than other standard components, especially the
Intel processors?', 'Would they have succeeded in the operating system market if they had
written DOS by themselves?', and so on. Who knows? But, from now on we will refer to
those computers based on the x86 architecture as PCs.
Oh, and as an academic I would like to give a special mention to the C programming
language, which has given me great heartaches over the years. Oh, yeah, it's used exten-
sively in industry and is extremely useful. It is the programming language that I would auto-
matically use for consultancy work. C is well supported by the major language package de-
velopers, and there is a great deal of code available for it. But for teaching programming, it
is a complete non-starter. Without going into too much detail, the problems with C are not
to do with the basic syntax of the language. It's to do with a thing called pointers. They are
the most horrible things imaginable when it comes to teaching programming languages, and
they basically 'point' to a location in memory. This is fine, but in most cases you don't really
have to bother about where in memory things are stored. But, C forces you to use them,
rather than hiding them away. So, in a C programming class, things go very well until about
the 8th week, when pointers are introduced, and then that's it. Oh, and don't get me started
on C++.

1.9 DEC

The main rival to IBM before the advent of the PC was DEC (Digital Equipment Corpora-
tion). They were formed in 1957, and grew to become the second largest computer company
in the world. Their unbelievable growth, and fall, is a lesson for any industry. Brothers Ken-
neth Olson and Stanley Olson, and Harlan Anderson started DEC on a start-up capital of
$70 000 (which was 70% owned by American Research and Development Corporation). This
should compare this with the start-up capital of Compaq, which was $10 million). DEC had
an initial clear strategy, which was to make cheap computers, which appealed to the special-
ist scientific and technical market. At the time, IBM had a quasimonopoly, and DEC did not
have a chance to compete with them on a like-for-like product range. DEC eventually thrived
because they attacked a small market niche with technically superior products. At the time,
they could not possibly compete with IBM in the larger commercial market, where IBM had
made a considerable investment. So, DEC turned to the scientific and technical market,
which required relatively small and configurable products. DEC could not compete with the
mighty IBM, who had a solid foundation of great marketing and sales teams. DEC was basi-
cally a company of engineers, and they were proud of it. Their main product was the mini-
computer, which was much cheaper than mainframes, but had a great deal of power, and
could be easily configured and managed by a small group.
The big winner for DEC was the PDP (Programmed Data Processor) series, which be-
come the foundation of many scientific and engineering groups. No research group or indus-