Attacking the 35$ (not) computah

On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 12:54:55 -0800) it happened Joerg wrote in :

Oh, if you go that way, where I worked we had a PDP10 in those days.

Did you?

In that eighties thing we had an IBM mainframe too.

All about image selling...

mmm never used one. What does it do to the brain? I did some experiments with ultrasound, probably more power. Blew up about 10 piezo tweeters in the process. Chased away birs and other life forms. To be more precise drug addicted youth. Sort of worked.... Older people could not hear it. Last week I tested how far I could still hear.

I think it was their defense against the clones.

Yes, do not know of any of that ISA stuff I made is still being used, but that sort of PCs would come in handy.

Industrial computers are not "PC"s

ROFL! That was a good one ...

No, but a family member. So I did not have my own PC (even with a discount I couldn't afford one as a stdudent) but had access.

Dark blue suits? I sure know those.

It buzzes it :-)

Predictably, that backfired hugely.

Never owned one. I certainly never would have worn one to work.

...as well as other things. ;-)

Except that's where you are wrong. It didn't backfire at all. It was a huge success in IBM's chosen market - business. It only "failed" when the whole model of the PC "failed" as a business line. Intel and M$ took all the profit out of the business so IBM left.

Because you probably had no or very little direct customer contact. Else they would have made ya :-)

Yeah. Went to Trader Joe's on the way home yesterday and scored, big time: Kennebunkport Winter Ale (the stuff with lots of volts) went on sale, from $7.99 down to $2.99 a six-pack. It became mine but I left four six-packs for others, as a courtesy :-)

Nope, sure wasn't:

That's exactly what I saw in Europe where, as a consultant, I got around a lot (and also as an employee before that). MircoChannel completely flopped over there, in the business world.

They screwed it up. I don't know what rode them with that idea of making stuff proprietary and demand license fees for board architectures. And then they had one of the best operatings systems ever made for a PC, OS/2, and what did they do? Let go of the steering wheel ... which caused it to crash and burn.

Don't get me wrong. IBM is IMHO a great company that stands by its products and makes things work. Our family has been tied to them probably longer than yours, and I've used their service later in life. But they did squander their PC market share.

But people continue to believe it was a blue monolith. Some even drank alcohol.

it,

So?

What is exactly what you saw? Were you a F-100 CTO?

No, they weren't after the same market. They knew there was no money in bottom feeding.

No, they didn't *WANT* your business. If you forced the issue, they'd grudgingly sell to you, but not on purpose.

It says why it failed in the marketplace.

What I am saying is that there were tons of PCs and they did not have a micro channel bus. CTOs typically don't know much about that, most certainly not F-100 company ones. I was an engineer.

profit

They thought they knew but were wrong. How do you think Bill Gates amassed this huge amount of wealth? Hardly by bottom-feeding.

Yeah, that I never understood. They left a lot of money on the table.

huge

Keep up that lie. As long as you start with that proposition you will always come around to "it failed". The fact is that it DIDN'T. It was quite successful in the market for which it was designed. Sorry, you aren't that market. IBM never cared about you.

Irrelevant. There were *LOADS* that did, because there was a value proposition in MC. Just because that value meant nothing to you (or I), didn't mean that others didn't value it. It didn't die until PCI took that position (and was late enough to benefit from cheap gates).

profit

No, they were *NOT* wrong. A company the size of IBM can't feed on the bottom. Its cost structure won't allow it and it can't be nimble enough.

On purpose. If you wanted to buy 20,000 identical machines, they'd probably get interested.

Industrial Computer

Personal Computer

You are contending that they are the same?

You are full of s*it. And you're stupid as well.

He is right. Its mostly unstable low cost crap.

IIRC Siemens has some decent industrial gear. HP also makes very reliable rack mount servers. Both will drain your budget and I doubt you can get ISA slots.

If you had to control trains and other critical mission type gear, you would have nice designs to do it with too. We have such a maker here in the US, but I will leave you to guess to whom I refer.

I don't want an ISA slot, but a 1U HP DL360 is a REAL nice piece of gear, and you can get one for like $1800. Dual Zeon, up to Ginormous RAM space (72GB+). Id buy one to replace my current PC in a heartbeat.

Some of the best chassis design and construction I have ever seen.

One torx driver allows complete disassembly/reassembly. One screw even, for the most part, in fact.

The 2U is even more bad ass.

And, even at 1U, it will take a dual space full ht graphics card. Cool design.

What I wrote was "industrial market", as in production equipment or research labs. They use a lot of ISA PCs. Sometimes they are mounted in

A lot of stuff simply won't run with an emulated LPT port. If the computer breaks you want a replacement with the least amount of differences possible because time is of the essence.

huge

Then none of the companies I had a clients were the market, and some were fairly big ones. Which makes me wonder, what was the market for micro-channel? Are there any solid numbers how many they actually sold? That's the only thing that would convince me that all the press about the market failure of the micro channel architecture is wrong :-)

So how come that you cannot buy PCs with micro channel anymore (at least I haven't seen any) but you can, for example, buy PCs with ISA bus connectors at almost every street corner?

What for did one absolutely need a PC with a micro channel bus?

profit

I know. That was always an issue big blue had. Like a big oil tanker, change of direction could take forever, or just didn't happen.

The let me ask you another question: Their big brass should have know what you wrote. So why did they even start developing their own OS/2?

Except that's not how business is done anymore, except maybe at the state level where money is not so important because it's taxpayer money and that's "free". Companies start a project or production with a few PCs. Then it grows and it's dozens of PC. Then it grows some more and ...

If you don't take care of a client from day one, someone else will.

Doh!

I just had a 'Dell PowerVault 725N Storage Server' delivered. It cost me $52.29. The build quality blows away their consumer PC line.

Their consumer and small biz gear is already pretty good to begin with. I've never had anything from Dell fail other than one hard drive. It's been over a decade now that I buy stuff from them.

Servers are great. If we need even better quality my clients sometimes design their own, custom enclosure and all. I just EMC'd one for a client and was impressed. Quiet like a church mouse.

Good for you, idiot. What you should have written was "industrial market still tied to legacy control hardware".

Us modern industrial folks use modern hardware, and modern PCs and modern hardware control layers.

Automated, pneumatically controlled test fixtures is a good example in this realm, because they are always being made.

You are a child, and even though you "saw" some such gear, you were simply 'in attendance', because you learned NOTHING.

No s*it. So do we. So do a lot of folks. We ALSO have migrated to more modern controls.

Wow. You really have a vast wealth of experience based intelligence there. HAhahahaha! NOT!

What a joke. Like you needed to declare such a given.

"Folks in industry use racks."

Nothing more needs to be said, idiot.

Have you ever looked at something you wrote BEFORE you send it, to see how stupid it sounds being read?

More stupidity. They are at least three years behind the consumer market typically. If you buy a "PC" from "Industrial Computer Source" for example, you will get items that were designed that long ago. Their manufacturing cycles are a lot longer, and they get deals buying up "old" "new stock".

Only those which are custom to the maker. Like SuperMicro, for instance. COTS parts are more new gear, and less if not NONE of the legacy stuff.

Whether you believe it or not, these problems were resolved as well.

A good IT guy would already have a spare motherboard around, ready to go. If that was you, you failed at that as well.

A FEW things will not. Sucurity dongles, and few other things.

Ever heard of "NET USE", dumbass? I have many softwares which ONLY look for HARD hardware ports, and I fool them all the time into firing off to LPT1, but it goes to our laser printer upstairs.

The die bonder PC broke because the retarded twits who were supposed to maintain it had no clue at that time, and very likely still have no clue. It probably broke because it was full of crud and never experienced even a single maintenance event in its life.