Geoff, 1 month ago

@garius great story, brilliant and insightful.

I'm inclined to differ on your description as Jobs as one of the winners of the era - Apple in the late 80s was pretty much crippled, only saved by a tiny minority of obsessive users and enough finance to limp through the 90s and make it to the iPod boom, which IMO was what made Apple the company it is now.

garius, 1 month ago

@Geoff survival was a win in that era.

But I agree that the margins were so thin once IBM rolled into town.

There are definitely timelines out there where it was Apple that went under and Osborne or Vector who survived.

And it's why i get annoyed when people cast Apple's survival as inevitable. it really wasn't.

adrianhon, 1 month ago

@garius brilliant! Also I harvested a bit of karma from this on HN 😛

garius, 1 month ago

@adrianhon I don't even want to know what the HN comments are like

isaackuo, 1 month ago

@garius

Cool story!

Of course, even if Vector Graphic had made all the correct decisions, that still wouldn't have necessarily led to success. It was a tough business.

In particular, MS-DOS compatibility was a whole different ball game than CP/M compatibility. With CP/M, partial compatibility was standard.

But that's not something most business customers were eager to wade into. So, MS-DOS compatibility wasn't enough - full IBM PC compatibility was needed ... that was non-trivial ...

garius, 1 month ago

@isaackuo yeah. it's why i don't think their decision to stick with CP/M was necessarily the wrong one AT THE TIME.

Hindsight is 20/20

I think a lot of people don't realise just how TOTAL IBM's blitz of the business computing - and then home computing markets was.

The path to survivability for Vector was very small once IBM showed up, but they definitely shot themselves in the foot a couple of times to make their chances of survival even worse.