Our emoles are everywhere
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IBM PC kept me in beers for 25 years
Wouldn't have wanted one, either. Poxy things. There were quite a few nicer microcomputers around, but IBM's decision to make a PC allowed people in large enterprises to buy the things and that made them respectable.
So welcome to loads of DOS based applications which only seemed to work well if they wrote directly to the video memory - welcome to the world of Harvard Graphics, to Lotus 1-2-3 and its gazillion add-ins, to Microsoft Project (aargh!) and to "integrated applications" which disintegrated.
Fast forward five years and I have an 8MHz zero waiting state AST 286 at work - what a beast! I could run the first version of Windows from Microsoft. What an advance! I borrow the Compaq luggable so I can work from home at the weekend. What a hunk! Both the machine and me in those days. But there's GEM - a graphical interface that seems to work quite well on a clunky 286 and even better on a 386.
A year or so on and IBM shows off its PS/2 and OS/2
operating systems with micro channel architecture (MCA). What a swizz! Big Blue tries to pull the wool over everyone's
eyes by suggesting its PS/2s wouldn't run without OS/2. It shows off Microsoft OS/2 with Presentation Manager at
Comdex. What a crock! Relations between Microsoft and IBM start to sour. What a surprise! We all still wait for version
4 of 1-2-3 which is delayed forever because Lotus keeps hiring software engineers which only makes the delay worse.
Anyway MS Excel is here, so who needs that crock of crap at the end of a sepia coloured rainbow?
Hey, we've also got Microsoft Word for Windows. Type books and loads of stuff like mad, not realising that with practically every future version there would be changes that turned backwards compatibility into a joke.
Microsoft and IBM finally burn their bridges - find myself flying in a rackety helicopter into Manhattan to be a guest of the Vole for the launch of Microsoft Windows 3.0. The 90s saw some real "innovations" from Microsoft what with Microsoft Windows for Warehouses, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows You and Windows Windows everywhere.
We attend Computex in Taiwan for the first time in 1990. Stan Shih from Acer tells an assembled mass of 150 hacks that he doesn't want to read negative things about his company once the hacks have departed. All the British hacks go back and mention this.
Every Etre conference in the early 90s is dominated by a huge fight between Philippe Kahn and Bill Gates to throw the biggest and most expensive parties. Bill wins. Some of us start to use Compuserve and complain to Oracle that holding a press conference in London for a "new product" that was available as a press release on Compuserve three weeks ago didn't really qualify as news at all. Informix gets fed up because we mention to the senior execs that the name sounds like it should be making concrete, not software.
A string of vendors start issuing fatwahs. HP says "you'll never work in this industry again" after we reveal that one of its Laserjets has a design defect that renders your printouts into the early 90s version of crinkly chips. Microsoft says "you'll never work in this industry again" after we reveal a Labour MP has asked embarrassing questions about licences in the UK parliament. AST says "you'll never work in this industry again" after we reveal swingeing job cuts at the firm.
We launch The Rogister as a chippie newsletter after me, Tony Dennis and John Lettice have a drink or three in a London pub.
We watch in fascination as Compaq's Eckhard Pfeiffer slowly takes apart senior Intel executive Hans Geyer over its Intel Inside campaign at an Etre conference. Geyer tells us on a bus that Sun is in Intel's sights.
Intel says: "You'll never work in this industry again."
2001. Fall out with The Rogister, launch The INQUIRER.
2006. Sell the INQ to VNU. Still working in the industry. Realise to my dismay that the IBM PC has kept me in paid work for 25 years. Sheesh kebab! And god bless IBM! µ
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