The PC Industry: Before
I must confess that I’m not much of an internet social networking person. I don’t really have a myspace account or facebook. I rarely write updates upon twitter. For instant messaging, I only use gTalk and only have a small amount of my friends on my buddies list. In all honesty, I’m terrible about being social online. However, I have found a few networks that I’ve grown to use quite often. One of these is an old form of internet communication, iRC. I am also quite active on youtube, and love to comment on videos.
There is something that I do quite often online though, that being research. I tend to not read news papers, instead I get my news from sources like BBC news online. I also travel over to other more specific sites like MacNN, science Daily, and PCWorld; all of which are setup in my RSS client. I like to think of myself similar to a scholar, in that, I study specific items that interest me, like astronomy and philosophy. Throughout all of these subjects, the one I’ve studied the most, and have the greatest knowledge with is the PC Industry. Now I don’t know everything about it and I’m still learning more and more, I specifically study things like events and trends. I try to discover the reason for why an event occurred. I also use this to estimate future trends and therefore events that have not yet happened. A good example of an event might be the time in which Windows became the dominant player. As well, a good example of a trend might be Internet Explorer, which has lost 20% market share in the last two years in a linear path. The two examples I used are closely related for the point of finding something common enough that all readers can relate too.
This brings me to the reason I write this. Well, in fact there are a few reasons. One, I love this subject; two, I like helping and teaching people; three, I’ve seen wrong or subjective comments I dare not say in this article. This first post is not really about the PC industry. It is more of a prologue to understand what the industry was like when the personal computer came to being.
It starts with the seven dwarfs, though not to do with snow white. It was a nick name given to a group of technology companies, for they were in the shadows of IBM. IBM has had a large career list starting back in the 1800s, originally 3 companies which merged in 1911 forming Tabulating Recording Corporation. In 1917 they branched out into Canada. The Canadian head quarters was named International Business Machines. Later the entire company was renamed this, going by the abbreviation IBM.
There have been quite a few controversial things IBM has done, including monopolistic conspiracy in the early 1900s and helping the Nazis tag and record prisoners in concentration camps. Those numbered tattoos on their arms is the id number used by IBM’s punch card system. Though I should remind you that that’s business, and most corporations don’t take sides.
IBM eventually got into the digital computing market when they began to work for the US government along with MIT in the mid 1940s. One of their finished projects was SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment). Over time they started building more complex and powerful computers soon taking over the market. This lead to their great power in the 1970s and into the 80s.
In reality, IBM did very little to help the PC industry until much later, they were the primary enemy. This brings in another monopolistic company, American Telephone & Telegraph. AT&T started out as one of the first telephone companies in the world. It was co-founded by, who many agree, was the inventor of the telephone (however there is much controversy over it). If you want to learn more about AT&T’s telephone business there is always google, but for this article I shall stick with the computer side of it. This brings us to the 1920s, when AT&T developed a new lab called Bell Laboratories. Here many discoveries and inventions were be made that change the world. AT&T Bell Labs as of the date of this article has been give six Nobel Prizes in Physics.
Do you have a camera? Flash based drive? Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X? Much of the foundations of our current technological times rests upon AT&T’s Bell Labs. They are the creators of UNIX, the programming language known as C, CCDs, Bubble memory (later flash), and the discoverers of electron diffraction which would later lead to solid state technologies like LCDs, LEDs, and SSD storage devices.
By the 1970s, AT&T was a leader in the operating system market. They changed their strategy from selling an entire server and software package by rewriting their operating system, Unics (programmed with the B language), and developing UNIX with C. C allowed UNIX to be platform independent, allowing AT&T to conquer more of the market.
This brings us to the next company, HP. There really isn’t much to say about Hewlett Packard that is truly needed. HP started out as more of an equipment and appliance inventor and maker. They are considered the founders of Silicon Valley, getting into the computer market around 1966. HP specialized in what was known as Minicomputers at the time. By the 1970s they were getting into the calculator and other micro computing devices. Later on they would pass on the personal computer, a market they could have conquered like so many.
Finally, there is one more company that played a big part in the birth of the personal computer. Some techie readers might know by now that I’m talking about Xerox. Xerox is not an easy company for mapping out its history. However it has a significant part in all of this. To clear a few things up however, I should mention that Xerox did not originally develop the first mouse neither the graphical user interface. Originally just a photo copier company, Xerox opened a laboratory in the 1970s for research known as Xerox PARC. Like Bell Labs, PARC has discovered and invented many things. The modern design concepts of a personal computer operating system’s graphical user interface was formed there. In the 1970s, Xerox PARC was moving into personal computer research, however its parent company did not like the business path. They believed the personal computer market did not exist, who would spend all that money on a computer for their personal use?
In the end the personal computer market came to being by, AT&T indirectly, HP by staying out of it, Xerox for revolutionizing it for anybody, and IBM who simply ignored it. Eventually I will go into more depth of the reasons why, along with the introductions of Microsoft in 1975 and Apple Computer in 1976. Till then, I thank you for reading. All articles, whether written by hobbyists or even experts in the field, need to be proofread; if you see any errors or think something that might be wrong please email me or leave a comment. These are typically written prolifically as I type what comes to mind, rather than outlined on paper. Saying this, I should mention this is a blog post.