The PC was never a true 'IBMer'

IBM’s Culture, Antitrust, and the “Not-Quite-IBM” PC

• Ongoing and recent antitrust actions constrained IBM’s willingness to leverage dominance; fear of new cases lingered into the 1990s.
• Several commenters argue IBM never culturally embraced the PC as a core, “real” IBM product, especially compared to mainframes/minis.
• Others push back: internally the PC division was generally respected, but hurt by structural issues like the internal “blue tax” that made it hard to compete on cost with Compaq/Dell.
• The death of the PC group’s early leader and the later move from Boca Raton to Research Triangle Park are described as culturally traumatic inflection points.
• IBM later exited low-margin PCs (e.g., selling ThinkPad to Lenovo) to focus on services and mainframes.

Openness, BIOS, and the Clone Explosion

• Many see the open, commodity-based IBM PC architecture as a historical accident that enabled clones and today’s build-your-own ecosystem.
• IBM’s one real moat, the BIOS, was documented in source form and then clean‑room cloned; this, plus Microsoft selling DOS to others, made clones inevitable.
• Some argue that even with a more closed IBM PC, earlier CP/M + S‑100 ecosystems showed that market forces would have produced an open 16‑bit standard anyway.
• Others note IBM later tried to re‑assert control with PS/2, Micro Channel, and AT patents, but by then the clone market and standards momentum were too strong.

Alternative Platforms and What Might Have Been

• Discussion covers DEC’s PDP‑11 “PCs,” Tandy, Apple II, and 8‑bit/16‑bit rivals (Amiga, ST, Spectrum, etc.) as roads not taken.
• Some claim IBM alone still had ~50% of the business market around 1990 and would have dominated even without clones; others, especially from Europe, recall a far more heterogeneous landscape.
• Several emphasize that virtually all early micros (including Apple II) were “open” in documentation terms, but Apple aggressively litigated clones.

From Open PC to Today’s Locked-Down Hardware

• Participants praise x86 PCs for enabling FOSS, hardware tinkering, and OS choice, contrasting this with locked-down Macs and smartphones.
• ARM is debated: technically not less open than x86, but fragmented boot/discovery standards, non‑socketed CPUs, secure boot policies, and vendor blobs make most ARM systems de facto closed.
• RISC‑V is seen as more open but currently underpowered for general desktop use.
• Some predict future ARM/RISC‑V ATX “PCs,” while others think they’d remain niche without a strong software ecosystem.
• Smartphones are called the “real” personal computer by some, but others reject this due to their locked-down, non–user‑controllable nature.