The PS/2 happened and effectively killed IBM's role in the PC market. IBM shot themselves in a bad place with that. Like, the PS/2 was basically IBM's 'CED' moment in the PC space, only unlike with the CED, which straight-up killed RCA as a company, the PS/2 didn't kill IBM as a company, it just killed them in the PC space.
this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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Dang. I remember when "IBM Compatible" was normal terminology.
Or “clone”
Lots of early PCs were termed “IBM clones”.
The fact that we even call them PCs is mainly down to the IBM PC (they didn't invent the term but I think they popularised it)
debating Microsoft's business practices, which we we all know were shady as fuck, is veering away from the point that ibm's loss of the home market is ibm's fault. ibm never saw the home market as a lucrative avenue
You should dig into how MS came to be and IBM's involvement.
They essentially created MS, and Billy Boy was their shill.
no. i am going to slightly contradict my earlier hyperbole but microsoft was formed by bill gates and paul allen to work with altair. ibm was not involved then. this is why i have serious doubts about historical events because even things that happened during my lifetime are being altered
I think the OP can be understood to mean “how MS came to be as successful as it was, as quickly as it was.”
Without assistance from IBM they’d likely be nothing.
Bill Gates mother was on a charity board with with the IBM CEO at the time, which is the only reason Microsoft got the contract IIRC, cause she used her connections to push for it
It's because they fill victim to the bad capacitor wave of 2k and burned billions of dollars replacing the mainboard from almost every Netvista desktop made. I know because I was the guy replacing them.
did anyone ever sue the capacitor plague manufacturers to recoup their costs?
I recall it being a Chinese company, and it was the year 2000, so no.
They were expensive as hell thats why.
Second dos game I ever played was Doom on a 486. My mum was doing a tax return for the local bowls club, and the manager let me play Doom on their computer while she was going through all the paperwork.
A couple years later we got our own Pentium 133mhz and a copy of Doom and Duke 3D.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
ypur back hurtd? eithrr your too young to rdmrmber or your so old your brain is making stuff up. what ibm 486dx? by thr time intel released the 486dx, ibm was already replaced by clones. hp, compaq, gateway
...IBM was still very much in the home PC market when doom was released, in fact 1993 was peak PS/1 era (or PS/2 if you were deep-pocketed)...
they were not "veryuch in the home pc market" they released the ps/1 to "reenter" the home market. the ps/2 was older. and never had a 486dx 2. th ps/1 had one 486dc2. so yes its possible but tjis article is about ibm losing the home market and they lost it by then, since the ps/1 was them trying one last time to "reeneter" it.
...the PS/1 was widely available at general retail (including every sears in america) for three years by the time doom swept the shareware scene, including one model fitted with a 486DX and ten models with a 486DX2...
i looked it up. i was counting the 2168 as one model but i guess there were ten variations. but your answers dont seem real. you sound like a young person who didnt buy a pc. we didnt buy pcs from sears. are you using ai?
...my first PC ran a MOS 6502, loaded programs from a philips cassette, and used an acoustic coupler modem...
are you using ai?
Maybe you should, your grammar is awful. Are you using your face to type?