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What Happened To IBM PCs? Why The Company Stopped Making Them (www.bgr.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/retrogaming@lemmy.world
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Y'all remember shareware Doom on an IBM 486DX?

Welp, my back hurts!

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[–] 8 points 6 months ago (4 children)

That article pretty-much tells the tale as I remember it, even if in super-condensed form. The IBM PC went hard for the business and 'high-end consumer' markets, and really whiffed upon everyone else who was curious about getting in to computers, but didn't have such disposable income. And then Bill Gates came along, who managed to rip off the Mac OS with relative impunity, and absolutely nuked IBM's chances of dominating with its own next-level OS and GUI.

Shareware Doom played from a single floppy was amazing, though. What an incredible breakthrough for those of us who'd only known laggy wireframe 3D simulators played on older 8-bit machines.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

    are we rewriting history? "and then bill gates came along". microsoft was with ibm since the beginning of the home market? microsoft was formed to work with ibm. microsoft is older than apple. microsoft was initially pushing os/2 but ibm wasnt interested in the home market so microsoft ripped off xerox like apple did. but the article was about ibm shifting focus away from the home market and that happened before 1993 (doom 1)

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Apple ripping off Xerox is a well-traveled myth. In fact Jobs & team famously negotiated a walkthrough of PARC, with the specific intention of drawing inspiration from the Star's rudimentary GUI, in return for shares of Apple. They then greatly expanded on those ideas to create their own OS. What Gates did with the Mac OS was similar to what M$ did with dozens of other companies, i.e. finding loopholes & barely-legal means to steal their content, one way or another.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    Current Windows (the NT line) has fuck all to do with Apple. It's DEC Alpha through and through as MS hired the core Alpha team when they were laid off.

    Mark Minasi wrote an article about it in 1998, and showed exactly how NT is Alpha.

    And DEC predates Apple by years.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    Er... who was talking about current Windows?

    I was talking about the original, which absolutely ripped off the GUI from the early Mac OS. That's the whole point when it relates to IBM at that stage-- they lost the hardware, OS-GUI and software battles to everyone else, spelling their doom.

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