FC: 20th anniversary of first IBM personal computer

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[CNN invited me on yesterday morning to talk about the 20th anniversary, 
and I pointed out the leaps in technology: 16KB was standard back in 1981, 
now we have 160MB of RAM -- a 10,000x difference. Back then, ~150KB floppy 
drives were standard equipment; now hard drives that hold 15 GB are 
commonplace -- a 100,000x difference. Wow. The below is from last Friday's 
MDJ, a daily journal of Macintosh news and lore. --Declan]

---

MDJ 2001.08.10 (August 10, 2001)
================================

   Copyright 2001, GCSF Incorporated.  All rights reserved.

[...]

* Another problem with the 20th anniversary of the PC love-fest:
  the notion that IBM took over the industry by allowing hardware
  cloning. CNN reported as much on TV this week, and an IBM engineer
  named Dave Bradley says on CNN's Web site [4] that it was a
  conscious choice: "By going with an open system you invite the
  rest of the industry to participate. For example, other companies
  such as Lotus were able to develop applications." The article goes
  on to say that "this paved the way for open hardware standards
  and, eventually, the opportunity for thousands of companies in the
  PC sector."

  [4] <http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/08/10/IBM.open.arch.idg/index.html>

  That's bilge - third-party developers were making Apple II
  applications four years before the IBM PC was released, and Lotus
  came to prominence by improving on the spreadsheet - a third-party
  program (VisiCalc) invented on the Apple II. IBM "allowed" cloning
  in the same way Angus cattle allow hamburgers. The company went
  with off-the-shelf parts for most of its PC to get it to market
  faster and to make service and manufacturing more cost-effective.
  The only proprietary IBM technology was the basic input-output
  system, or BIOS, but it was small. Other companies managed to
  legally clone the BIOS by proving there was no copyright
  infringement in their engineering work, using clean-room
  techniques that courts upheld. IBM tried to shut down cloning, but
  it didn't work. The company also tried to regain control of the PC
  architecture with the PS/2 bus and other efforts, all of which
  failed.

  Now it's twenty years later, and IBM is just as insignificant a
  maker of PCs as Apple is, with a stronger notebook presence but no
  desktop sales in the US. In all of the praise for IBM, no one
  wants to mention that it worked out well for Compaq and Dell -
  companies that do little original R&D - but not for IBM itself.
  Don't fall for the myth.

[...]

**Business News**

* Apple Computer may soon have marketing help in dispelling the
  common notion that faster microprocessor clock rates mean faster
  performance. Advanced Micro Devices will launch [5] its new state-
  of-the-art Athlon processor in September, but it will top out at
  1.5GHz while Intel's Pentium 4 will be close to 2GHz if not
  faster. Even so, the Athlon chip is expected, as it does today, to
  provide greater overall performance - Intel has compromised some
  chip performance to get higher clock rate numbers because Intel
  knows people focus on the clock rate as the heuristic for system
  performance. CNet News says that AMD will launch a marketing
  campaign to "stress that numbers don't tell the whole story."
  Analysts like AMD's story, and they'll be more than happy to tell
  reporters how AMD's chip performs better than Intel's chips at the
  same clock rate - and perhaps even better than "faster" Intel
  processors. The more it becomes common knowledge that clock rates
  aren't the whole story, the more Apple's Power Macintosh G4
  systems, still to cross the 900MHz barrier, benefit.

  [5] <http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6816090.html>

* The Recording Industry Association of America, still about two
  tracks behind the top of the charts, is pursuing its attempt to
  kill peer-to-peer music transfer by jumping up and down on
  Napster's carcass. In its latest filing [6], the RIAA is asking
  for summary judgement against Napster, hoping it won't have to
  endure an actual trial and the negative press that may ensue. The
  sad thing is, it may work: the trial judge in San Francisco,
  Marilyn Hall Patel, has demonstrated almost unprecedented disdain
  for Napster, having seen her pre-trial injunctions against Napster
  overturned by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals twice already,
  including a breathtaking order that would have required Napster to
  prove that _no_ copyrighted material was available on the service,
  a standard so strict that not even pen and paper technology could
  meet it. The RIAA continues to believe that by stomping on
  Napster, it's sending a message to those who would challenge its
  record-breaking profits. Unbeknownst to them, the message turns
  out to be "decentralize so there's no service to sue." Peer-to-
  peer file transfer isn't going anywhere.

  [6] <http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2001/08/08/napster/>

[...]

**System reliability** -- Just for fun, the _Attitudinal_ counted
  ten occurrences of the term "panic" in the Note. That's as in
  "kernel panic," the one problem that makes Mac OS X sink faster
  than Gary Condit's re-election chances. Normal crashes don't
  affect the entire system because they run in their own, separate
  address spaces. Mac OS X destroys the address space and the damage
  is contained. If code running inside the kernel address space
  crashes, the ballgame is over - the kernel must survive for the
  system to stay up and running. Unlike traditional Mach systems,
  the Mac OS X kernel includes a fat lot of code, including all
  device drivers, for performance reasons. The system could use a
  privileged messaging architecture so that drivers ran outside the
  kernel but got permission to touch the hardware to do their driver
  work, but that would just be too slow, especially compared to Mac
  OS 9's "Hey, we're all one big happy family" attitude.

  Take a look at the potential kernel panics that the various
  releases fix:

* When inserting a CD into an external SCSI CD/DVD drive (fixed in
  10.0.1)

* When unplugging a FireWire hub (technically, a repeater) with
  many hard drives attached (fixed in 10.0.1)

* When plugging or unplugging "some third-party USB devices,"
  followed by a list of seven separate Apple bug numbers attached to
  the problem (fixed in 10.0.2)

* When "some third-party USB serial adapters" are in use (fixed in
  10.0.2)

* Attempting to list all kernel processes through the Unix routine
  systcl (fixed in 10.0.2)

* As part of a series of nine bug fixes related to burning CDs
  with "various internal and external CD-RW drives" (fixed in
  10.0.4)

* In rare circumstances when rebooting while multiple FireWire
  devices are attached (fixed in 10.0.4)

* More CD-RW problems (fixed in 10.0.4, but different from the
  earlier fixes, for these five bugs were in the mass storage
  drivers and not in the disc burning routines)

* Aborting a USB pipe - in other words, a driver attempting to
  cancel an in-progress USB transaction (fixed in 10.0.4)

[...]

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