Unbundling IBM Freed the Software Industry
2024 ж. 18 Ақп.
73 492 Рет қаралды
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Links:
- The Asianometry Newsletter: www.asianometry.com
- Patreon: / asianometry
- Threads: www.threads.net/@asianometry
- Twitter: / asianometry
When you think of all the different software functions inside an office bundle... and considering the majority of us never use many of those functions, it's strange to think of the history of office software bundles. Back then, it would have seemed inconceivable to write all that useful code, just to bundle it with a suite anyone can afford (free in some cases)
Seems throughout history, regardless of product, "free" isn't free. Free is just a tease for the reality.
Office suites were not free back in the day, microsoft once made half of their profits off office, never windows
There was a shift in corporate strategy from hardware-brained profit maximization to software-brained. The "old" guard don't get it and thus try protect the wrong things. I think now the pendulum has swung too far to everything as a service.
@@brodriguez11000i learned decades ago, i can't afford free, lol!
@@sunnohhyeah, i think open source had a lot to do with bringing down prices...
Fortran dominant in the 1950's? Man it was dominant until the 90's for engineering and science and its libraries are still in wide use - translated to other languages or linked to programs written in other languages. Still see people using it directly.
FORTRAN is alive and well. In some cases is the bedrock upon which many large enterprises run.
Yeah, ackchyoollie quite a few algebra libraries for languages like Java use wrappers for LAPack and BLAS that are written in Fortran. Also, as a small kid in the pre-collapse soviet union, I've had a kid's book about computers where one of the protagonists was called Prof. Fortran.
The core math and statistics libraries used in R are from the "ancient ones" thoroughly
The core math and statistics components used in R are from the 60+ year old thoroughly debugged FORTRAN libraries.
What people don't realize is that until the tech boom coding was not seen as a prestigious job, it was a technical vocation only a handful of people even knew the necessity of. That's why you see so many women coding early computers, because the men were typically building them and running the experiments on them.
Besides the Ada Lovelace story I had no idea about this until now. I've seen a lot of people, myself included, buy into the thought that women biologically lack skill in logic and mathematics, and it's incredible to me that most early programming was done by women. I knew I was wrong but not by so much!
There also was another source of the software: books. From 1960-s to 1990-s there were many books with source code listings. These required typing, but many programs were small. This worked well in science. An author of a book got his/her money from the publisher, it was independent from hardware makers and kinda worked. All ended with the Internet of course.
I remember testing out programs from computer magazines in the 80s. Seems comical now
Only 300,000 pages to go!
@@bakedbeings ha! you couldn't enter many pages of code before you were out of memory back then
@@danielsanichiban To top it off, the C64 forgot the whole thing when you switched it off.
How to go from being THEE Tech Company to being a consulting agency.
Going bancrupt, or near bancrupt, closing warehouse, fire staff - IDK
This is God sent content bro Never stop this
The fact "CUC" was always specifically spelt out every time is really funny to me
I see what you did there. 👍🙂👍
Rolls Royce does almost exactly the same as IBM did back in the old days. The customer pays for each hour they run the engine and the manufacturer pays for all servicing so the "owner" of the engine only has variable costs. IBM still controlled the market in servicing. You had to be a registered engineer to get the key to it. One of my old staff used to do it and explained all of this back in the early 90s.
and now, this exactly same pricing model is going still wild on AWS and other cloud computing platforms...
@@MIO9_sh And in some ways the cloud is just a return of leased processing and in some cases for the same reasons as long ago, If you are a smallish firm doing say AI research you cannot afford the hardware, staff and power needs for that kind of processing. But for a nominal fee you can use Amazon's compute resources that are already built. In previous times it was similar, many firms were too small to afford the hardware needed to do their processing jobs, it wasnt AI but it was still processing.
FinOps - A whole business model for managing the economics of cloud services. Cisco released an Expert series certification track for their licensing. You can be a Cisco Certified Licensing Expert and the test is really hard!
@@MIO9_sh yes, and in my opinion it's great. Modern hourly billing and the associated reporting/analysis capabilities encourage tech groups to operate with continual awareness of operational cost, and just as importantly it also allows capacity for short-lived experiments that was previously a lot more expensive to acquire. I don't ever want to go back to the common model for the first half of my career where costs had to be tracked across far more vendors (rented rack space, power, enclosures, external connectivity, networking, storage, maybe separate storage networking, compute, virtualization, ...) and it was much harder to attribute cost to customers or projects. You could absolutely still do it, but the labour intensity of doing so was absurd, and very few people in an org had access to all of the cost data. Extremely hard to assess and track cost of providing a service vs what a customer (external or internal) was billed for their service. Maybe other people had better experiences but this was mine, and I haven't heard otherwise from my industry peers.
Buying the engine vs. renting the engine goes to different areas of the P&L sheet. It also saves the user from specializing in something that is not his core business. Finally RR-engines are talking constantly to their homebase, which in some cases avoided crashes, because the pilots where warned by remote tecsnishans about upcoming issues during the flights. Lastly in some cases RR knew where planes where heading to even if no other tracking was available.
the early years of computers were interesting. a lot of things we take for granted now was not seen as normal. i thought 80s computers were strange because there was more than just mac and pc. but in this era it was like every computer was its own thing and you had a lot of unusual designs as people were trying to figure out the best way forward .
SAP had the same result: companies adapted their business processes to their "software".
SAP is a monster. Nowadays, whoever has to build the structure of a work organisation, take the functions (and job descriptions) from a SAP flowchart, and build the workplace accordingly. Just saying...
Good grief SAP SUCKS, like I get it, it probably possible to set it up in a way that's easier to navigate, and I understand the need for backwards compatibility, but the amount of time and money wasted fighting that monstrosity is insane
Yes SAP is a monster and a pain. The upside is that it forces structure and order into what otherwise would be a flying circus of monkeys chasing headless chickens with waffle bats. 🙂
I don't think any companies changed their business process to 'adapted' themselves to suit SAP. I know that a business will change it's processes, procedures, or protocols in order to suit SAP.
Would love to see a history of SAP video. I’ve use SAP PEO, but there’s a whole lineage to just that one piece
"Unbundle" is what Lister shouts in Red Dwarf.
UnRumble.
It was, but I couldn't make the joke if I'd repeated it correctly.@@tracktornator
This and the nostalgic corporate images of 60’s computer rooms made me think of lowly C.C. "Bud" Baxter working at his Insurance Company juggling the use of “The Apartment”. 😄
Wow that not something I expected to be thinking about from an IBM video. Great 1960s movie: The apartment
And now with extortion (a.k.a. "subscription") based software we get to pay for it over and over again!
And here I thought it was the development of the C programming language and/or Unix which freed the software industry, allowing programs to be written independently of whatever hardware a customer would want them to run on. Those followed very shortly afterward: Unix in 1969, and C in 1972, from Bell Labs.
Once again, another excellent video covering a topic that should be told but wasn’t. Great stuff.
That was IBMs strength. Top of the line customer service. Above and beyond other computer manufacturers. Even if a Burroughs, or CDC computer was more powerful, people still tended to go to IBM, because of IBM's hand holding.
it was. thank you, come again.
...and then dec showed up and kicked everybody's ass!
Video idea: Ubisoft Singapore and the Skull&Bones governmental subsidies situation
Reread IBM's strategy but think "Apple Computer"
Hardeehar
The Walled Garden
it almost reminded me of Xerox PARC and how the hardware ("printer heads" / toner jockey) people couldn't figure out how to market or sell or do anything useful with the platform / software.
Very interesting. I think it was ultimately unsustainable given the explosion in customers and users coming down the road a decade later. IBM sold you the whole enchilada, complete solution from analysis, design, implementation, testing and training for the price of a computer. Hardly surprising that they dominated the market. The issue arises when your customers are smaller and computers get smaller and cheaper that bundling becomes less economical. Imagine accompany doing that for every PC, tablet and smartphone sold. The bespoke white glove service is only effective for the biggest customers with the deepest pockets. The model would have to evolve eventually due to the widespread adoption of computers.
Didn't "unbundle" the OS.
DEC were instrumental in popularising computer-based solutions for smaller organisations & reducing the cost of "ownership" & the ongoing costs
Yay new asianonemtry
Ibm sales droids had to be legally stopped from mentioning new products if they didn't have firm deli-every dates. They used to tell customers "don't buy that NCR piece, we're coming out with one next month."
Love this channel, thank you for your uploads.
aww, I like the image of us being a bunch of baby deer listening to the adult deer telling us a story. And it's always nice when your personality shines through in the videos. :)
Your videos are great. Such a great way to unwind at the end of the day. Calm, clear, interesting storytelling. And I always learn something that makes me more grateful and amazed by the technology I usually take for granted.
Asianometry did an excellent job. I expect to appreciate the technology and the computer I use more and more like never before.
This is apt considering I'm listening to the "Advent of Computing" podcast and he's been covering development of the System 360.
are you naked and happy, right now?
You're a really good storyteller. Informative. Thanks.
I find the early history of computers so fascinating. It's interesting to see how things have changed in the industry.
This is truly one of the best KZhead channels on here. Thank you so much for this great content you put together.
Interesting how Apple have the bundling software model, albeit with third party software from Adobe et al., not to mention the app store where they take 30% on everything.
Right? One common theme across these videos is that antitrust people actually did something, and even the most influential of the companies weren't safe from being torn apart if they became too big. Nowadays, the 5 companies do whatever the hell they want, and only ever get some smacks from the EU. We used to be a proper country, goddamn!
Unbundling was inevitable. When you consider the cost savings in being able to choose hardware and software vendors separately, eventually an IBM competitor would have caught on and theb they would be the market leader, not IBM. This is exactly why Windows has stuck around for so long despite being a dumpster fire. Again, we see the containerization revolution begin to eat away at the monolith. Hopefully, this bew age will be freer than the last two.
Not really. Look at Microsoft's annual report and you'll notice that OS really isn't where the bulk of their money is being made. The enterprise market and gaming is.
No, Windows actually became entrenched because hardware manufacturers had to sign up to coercive agreements with Microsoft, practically forbidding them from supplying competing operating system products or making it financially unviable for them to do so.
I think an interesting topic for your channel might be the origin and evolution of the SABRE system for airline bookings. It would intersect well with your focus on the intersections of technology, business, and new norms.
Thanks for teaching us stuff
Best episode yet. All so true!
Sorry this was meant as a reply to the comment addressing the ubiquitous use of IBM Blue on their products.In my time at IBM there were a number of options for the end doors for the ES 9000 series of mainframes. All the basic color palette were available but from my colleagues I was told that for example companies such as John Deere and Yellow Freight had their own custom colors. I worked with several people that were involved with system installs at customer sites. Since installs of these required raised floors and strong temperature control. They were very often installed behind glass walls. I was told that these were frequently used by the customers to show off to their customers of their very advanced data processing equipment in which case IBM Blue was a bragging point.
I appreciate the citation of the DALL-E pixel art.
I recall that back in the day, the labour-controlled Nottingham (UK) County Council made it a requirement that IBM replace the Conservative Blue panels of their new computer with Labour Red. I suspect that the various shots of red-panelled IBM kit, such as at 13:40, are of that system.
No, I suspect that the color for the System/360 was red for marketing purposes. A lot of the pretty pictures (made for brochures and publications) of various models all have red panels. I think the color for the System/370 was blue or white.
The story is that IBM entered the photocopier business in 1970 because they were flooding the government with documents during the anti-trust trial. It resulted in lawsuits from Xerox, claiming that IBM had violated 22 of their patents (despite IBM already being a licensee of many of them for their printers). This might be an interesting thread for you to follow.
Well done presentation, thanks for putting it together. I'm not sure if the Microsoft/IBM PC relationship was part of the decision to drop the case (i.e. you technically didn't need to use PC-DOS on the initial IBM PC, there was technically DR-DOS and Xenix). But anyhow, the case was dropped just a couple months after the release of that IBM PC in late 1981. AT&T was another interesting case - there was a time (late 60's) when they wouldn't even allow people to put answering machines on their lines.
My first thought when I saw the title of this video was hardware, with vendors like Amdahl and Hitachi. I was in the software side shortly afterwards. There was a huge market for custom business applications.
Wait, wait, wait, IBM's Complete Solution is essentially SaaS?! Good grief, that business model is almost as old as the software industry itself!
In a very real sense, one didn't go to IBM for a computer, but rather for a data processing solution. The typical use case wasn't built on 'I need something to run this software on' or 'I need software that does these functions ', but rather 'I have this data and need to extract this information '.
I always get notifications for your videos, but not this one... You might want to reupload it or make a community post with a link to it
Got through the 60s without a single mention of Burroughs 🤓
They did a lot of advanced research, a lot of the early digital computer chips were from them...
Another outcome of the IBM unbundling was the rise of corporate IT groups. Prior to the unbundling, IBM would hold the company's hand and walk them through data processing changes "for free". Afterwards, that cost became explicit, and with many suppliers for different software, building out your own IT department was a reasonable option to having IBM try and coordinate all of the data processing resources.
Now do DEC
"Its a beautiful thing" as the saying goes in new york
Next video- "Unbundling IBM Freed the Hardware Industry".
12:12 If tie-in or bundling sales is really illegal, how do car manufacturers get away with it? When buying a car you no longer pick options a-la-carte. Options are increasingly bundled. If you want one option, you end up paying for other bundled options. TV Cable industry famously did the same. My point is... is bundling really illegal? I think there may have been another legal concept involved, just not bundling.
You can order a vehicle exactly as you wish, but now it takes much longer. Dealerships really don't make any more on the sale, so you'll be up against some resistance from a lot of them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's only illegal if you don't pay enough lobby money.
Not until there is a market for installing different software programs/packages that modify the way your car works (hardware). There is the tuning of the engine ECU (mapping?) but so far the car manufacturers haven't complained about it
@@gus473 That's not true at all. Hondas for example only has 3 trim levels too choose from. If you want leather seats, you have to go into a top level and pay for, say, navigation, which you don't need.
The equivalent bundles for cars would be: you have to by fuel from the car company. Not having a custom build car is more like not getting a computer exactly build with the parts *you* want. You don’t want X86 instructions, but ARM ones -> not Intels issue.
It is a two sided blade that cut many ways. With ibm hardware and software you have a monopoly… and use of card to measure usage get ibm into anti-trust
Great!
Solid content. Did IBM ever profit from customer's data?
IBM never mined the customer data...
@@rayoflight62 was it by choice? Or they missed the opportunity?
This idiot thinks mainframe computers ad pop up ads
They existed before the idea of turning the customers into the product hit the tech industry
I think the "Software" meant Application Software, not the bootloader nor the Operating System. Case in point, in 1972 System/370 has the VM/CMS, while "pure" O.S. is MVS. Per Wikipedia, seems there's open sourced version of VM/CMS as well as paid/supported version. I am not sure. However, it's not in the instruction-set public knowledge era, so there is no possibility of having VMware nor Openstack. :(
Not sure what you mean by "instruction-set public knowledge era", but the Wikipedia article for IBM System/370 notes that GCC could target the 370 architecture, and the current release still supports the 390 and zSeries architectures. And, of course, Linux has run on the 390 and zSeries as an IBM-supported product. But it seems that Linux (and potentially other) systems can only run as guests in the hypervisor environment (z/VM), with customers unable to replace the hypervisor with something else. You can run emulators of zSeries machines such as Hercules on other hardware, but you then need to acquire a suitable operating environment to run in the emulated machine. (This is where IBM refuses to license newer products to run in such emulators, leading to a complaint being brought against IBM in the EU that was later dismissed.) I imagine you could make something like Linux, or maybe a Free Software hypervisor, run at the appropriate level in such emulators, but since such a product would never get a chance to run on a real zSeries machine, and since you could just run such a hypervisor on other hardware instead, I guess it isn't significantly interesting to do. That said, I imagine that people have looked into it, anyway.
@@paul_boddie I don't know in 1972, IBM would have released the System 370 instruction set documentation, especially hypervisor related for external software firm development purpose. I am guessing it's not, since other Compute hardware companies can learn and/or imitate.
@@ccshello1 I guess Amdahl implemented the architecture and must have known the details of it, judging from the Amdahl 470/6 reference manual (from 1973) that I just found. I also found the "System/370 Extended Architecture Reference Summary" (from 1989, but based on earlier publications dating back to 1984, which one might expect since it is about ESA/370, not plain System/370) that describes details of the instruction set. But without looking further, I don't really know. I only wanted to point out that the ISA seems reasonably well understood to the extent that emulators need VM implementations to be commercially useful and must therefore provide all the necessary hypervisor support. Again, this is without digging deeper into these products.
Just think about Linus Torwalds. He had some Intel documents on 386 architecture, like you would have had in the 70s for a /370, but he was also able to buy the bare silicone to try it out. With rented time on a mainframe you can’t debug an os running on the bare hardware. At least not w/o simulation software, that would need to know how the software works and how to find out. With 386 you needed a 386sx pc in 1990 and a 32bit version of GCC running in a DIS-extender. Put a bootloader on a floppy and let it load a kernel that switched to 32-bit mode and read keyboard and write to screen. How I know? I did it, while someone in Finnland did the same. But as I rarely got some of my private projects done, but he did, I now use his kernel since at least 20y. Back to big iron: it’s just to un-affordable to create an OS without having a (big) business behind.
@@fromgermany271 Naturally, if you lower the barriers to entry, you get a lot more people doing interesting things. That said, with regard to big iron operating systems, the story about Amdahl's UTS is informative and also slightly amusing, its origins involving students deciding that they would simply have a go at porting Unix to System/370. Take a look at the Wikipedia article for Amdahl UTS and follow the reference to Tom Lyons' blog where he tells the story.
you should have started with the 360 architecture. unlike the seven dwarfs programs written on 360 mdl 20 could run basically as is on another mdl 20 or 60. hence the PCMs, 3rd party system software etc with unbundling in the late 60s.
Not so. The Univac 9000 series and the RCA Spectra were CPU-compatible with the IBM 360. Same Assembler, RPG, COBOL, etc.
Ooh, I assume you listen to Advent of Computing?
Imagine going back to the 60s and telling these guys that one of the biggest markets in consumer pc's would be games lol. They'd picture some 10 pixel screen and tell you to lay off the reefer.
Get them & keep them on a service subscription & consumables plan, wasn't that always the goal even in the Hollerith days?
Consumer-facing software versioning is one of the greatest scams of the Anthropocene.
Does this sound like AWS?
That’s why we old geezers laugh about the new stuff. All been there before with „a bit“ less computing power. 😂
U have got to make next video on how US helped boom India's Outsourcing Services Industry.
What happened to your spotify reposting? I miss it greatly.
any one have any suggestions for further reading on this topic?
yeah rip twin corp xerox and rca
What was the most exciting IBM software of the time and of this era? And what was the software used for?
Well it was mostly wasn't meant to be exciting Kind of like being an EMT if things get exciting it means bad things are happening to people. Examples would be the SAGE air defense system, SABRE system for the airlines and the Air Traffic Control systems
@@giantgeoff what is an emt?
@@giantgeoff And what did the sage and sabre system actually do as compared to how things were run before computers.
@@21stcenturyscots EMT = Emergency Medical Technician. Having been one, One doesn't get called out unless something bad has happened to someone.
@@21stcenturyscots Sage was for detecting incoming missile attacks during the Cold War. Sabre was a centralized realtime system for making airline ticketing reservations. It was the first of it's kind and a precursor of all the systems that we take for granted today.
Imagine: A time when IBM was relevant 🤯
13:20 what are ghost computers?
They are the computing equivalent to a Tesla Roadster MK2. Solely announced to distract. In IBM case from different manufacturers, in the latter case more as a stock prize stunt. Same motivation: $$$
Interesting history.
It's interesting that what IBM was doing was seen as illegal, but you can't buy a Samsung phone without android, or a Mac without Mac OS.
For Apple that is true, but on Android phones you can install any other operating system.
@@daseinzigwahrem On some of them you can, but you have to buy them all with Android installed (as far as I know.)
What I always wonder is why IBM is still around, and still somehow makes billions per year despite having lost both the desktop PC market and the software market. I'd love a vid going into detail about what the frick they actually do these days. I assume part of their lifeline always has been DARPA/NASA other related blackbox projects for US gov.
Stock market, banking, and casino systems. Plus patents. And they recently teleported a particle. Or it's like McDonalds - they got money in real estate just by being so early to get buildings that are now in prime locations.
Dave's Garage did a great overview on their z16. Still very much relevant today for a lot of corporations you would imaging would use them (Apple's stores for a start!). kzhead.info/sun/otl6d5iuj3iFhZs/bejne.html
Just another Earth-changing event that took place in 1969
sweet takedown!
People are still mad at Nixon 50 years later.
IBM was such a great company, what happened to it recently?
🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏
You know, the word niche is not pronounced like "Nietzsche", but like "nee-sh" (just letting you know)
You got some weird background noise going on.
Sounds like a split-unit AC system fan.....
And now we're back to bundling and worse. At least IBM didn't demand 30% of the price a customer pays to buy a third party software.
A lot of it comes for free with an app store or your computer too. Also, that price simply reflects costs at the time. These days there are code monkeys in turdworld states that will code up aps for peanuts so that the country can pretend they have technology
12:12 The master of this is Apple. Case in point: Airpods. Software c**k blocking
Gona are the days that the DOJ did not behave like a Gestapo
"…like as…" - Use one word or the other in these cases.
:)
ENIAC wasn't programmed by 6 women as in they came up with the script, it was designed by 9 men and given to 6 women to implement. It's no different a secretary transcribing a memo.
You're not a deer, stop the lies!! Thanks for the video.
Very disappointing video that leaves out the massive role of Atlanta based MSA
You keep saying "like as" specifically to annoy me, don't you