Re: Too much credit
> Itsy Bitsy Morons always had a schizophrenic attitude towards PCs and to a lesser extent minis at the time. They worshipped big iron and could not understand why people would want a "toy" or "crippled iron".
You write as if IBM were one thing. It was divided up into several divisions, each with their own sales and marketing and each competing against the others. The mainframe division (360/370) wanted a small computer to counter the Apple IIs with Visicalc, Z80 softcard and CP/M software invading their sites. The IBM-PC was designed to be 20% better than the Apple II (160Kb floppies instead of 120Kb etc) and also act as a terminal (which is why the IBM PC has DTE serial ports while other micros had DCE) while running the same software. There were also 3740 (terminal) PCs and 360 emulating PCs (with Motorola 68x00 co-processor boards) for developers to use to write mainframe software.
The mainframe division did look down on the Series One, System 3, System 36 and System 38 (AS400) and other divisions, but did not see the IBM PC as any threat at all. They did want to exclude other brands though.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
