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  • I used CDC computers 1986-92. They sucked, and CDC employees could not comprehend that they sucked. They had convinced themselves that their alternate universe was real.
    by bediger4000
  • The most striking thing to me about IBM memos from this era is just how literate executives were. These days most VPs struggle to write a single sentence worth reading.
    by adonovan
  • Excerpts from Mark Smotherman's ACS site [1] ...

    > To achieve a profit for the ACS program, Amdahl asked IBM management to approve three ACS/360 models: the high-performance design, a 1/3 performance version, and a 1/9 performance version. He felt that these performance goals would be a good fit with the System 360 marketing plans. He remembers that IBM Corporate Marketing evaluated the targets and reported: "1) the supercomputer alone was a loss leader! 2) the supercomputer plus the 1/3 performance computer was break-even! And 3) the supercomputer plus both the 1/3 performance computer and the 1/9 performance computer was normal profit -- 30% pre-tax!"

    > Gene Amdahl interview in April-June 1997, IEEE Design and Test of Computers: "The company decided not to build it because it would have destroyed the pricing structures. In the first place, it would have forced them to make higher-end machines. But with IBM's pricing structure, the market disappeared by the time performance got to a certain level. Any machine above that in performance or price could only lose money."

    > In his autobiography, Father, Son, & Co., Tom Watson, Jr., writes about the Model 90 series in competition with CDC and his decision to cancel their sales (Bantam Books, 1990, page 384): "Finally my business sense overcame my pride and I belatedly figured out that we couldn't compete with Control Data for the same reason that General Motors can't compete with Ferrari in building two-hundred-mile-an-hour sports cars. Supercomputers had become so highly specialized that even if we came up with a design equal to theirs, it would never fit in with the rest of our product line, our style of selling, our volume and profit targets, and so on." He goes on to say that his "temper was partly to blame for IBM's erratic behavior in the supercomputer market".

    [1] https://people.computing.clemson.edu/~mark/acs_end.html

    by boisterousness
  • So the CDC 6600 wasn't considered a RISC machine, but a precursor?
    by kristianp
  • Interesting to note the question had the answer all along. How would a modest effort outrun a vast organisation?

    I never imagined he’d be caught by that mistake.

    by rbanffy
  • Classic example of a small very motivated team with free reigns vs committee development at IBM. The irony is that less than 20 years later IBM would do the same thing and it lead to the IBM PC.
    by christkv

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