IT’s a series of accidents that changed the world
There’s a great book called “Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date” by Robert X Cringley (not his real name) charting the development of what we collectively refer to today as “Information Technology” (or IT).
IT today is pervasive; although we could in theory run our businesses without it, we would put ourselves at an extreme disadvantage compared to our competitors.
The reason why is because it enables us to increase productivity. We can process data faster than if we used paper, pen, and calculators. We can create, store, and retrieve documents in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take, and we can send them by email so they arrive at their destination instantly. We can take backups of our important data and store off-site. We can use the internet to reach out to potentially thousands of customers who are looking for our services. In short IT has changed business dynamics forever.
So it’s interesting to step back a bit and understand how it all came about. Going back to the book referred to in the opening paragraph, it explains how Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and other IT companies got started, how Excel and Office came about, and more. To sum it up, it was a series of blunders, accidents, vision, opportunism and timing …………
Anyone with kids, especially teenage boys will know that a computer or more importantly computer games have some magical hold over them; they spend hours transfixed in front of these screens, often at the expense of other social activity. In the 1970’s the equivalent scenario was teenage boys and young adult males, some described as nerds, others as hippies, plus some serious some academics, playing with the latest (but by today’s standards very crude) electronic DIY kits, programming them to do things like bleep a tune or something. This is how people like Apple’s Steve Jobs got hooked into programming. And as a school kid, Bill Gates was managing to get some precious programming time on his high school mainframe. I mention these two specifically because Steve Jobs and Bill Gates can be credited as “inventing” modern desk top computers and facilitating the mass market adoption of them respectively.
Meanwhile (and this is the corporate blunder bit) – Xerox, who were doing very nicely selling copiers, got a bunch of talented people together – egg-heads, designers, artists, and the like, locked them a room in Palo Alto (in California), gave them comfy bean bags to relax on and told them to create Xerox for the future, in a world without paper.
What came out of this process were amongst other things – the computer mouse, graphic interfaces (e.g. Mac OS and Windows), object oriented coding (ok if you don’t already know what this is – it’s a way of writing programs that enabled software to run on distributed systems rather than just on single mainframe …..ok you may not know what this is either, but it’s an important milestone in software and PC development), and some other related stuff. However some other “clever” executives at Xerox decided it had all been a waste of time and invited Steve Jobs – who had co-started Apple in his garage – to take and make use of what had been developed.
At a stroke, Xerox lost the opportunity to be the IT giant it could have been and Steve, being the visionary he was and is today – no doubt licked his lips and said thank you; and so the Apple company as we know it today began. Apple brought out the Lisa – its first desktop computer which incorporated many of the features of the Xerox Palo Alto project. Let’s call it a “PC” for the sake of convenience. At around $10,000 it was pretty expensive but infinitely cheaper than the big IBM mainframes on offer, which came with mouth watering price tags and multi-million dollar maintenance contracts.
Some nosy IBM sales people saw these strange looking machines on the desks of their customers and asked them what and why. The reason given was that it was easier to perform spreadsheet calculations on these machines using a new fangled program call VisiCalc, than booking time on the mainframe and waiting for a couple of weeks for the results to come back.
Rewind – the VisiCalc spreadsheet program was created for the early PC’s by a couple of US academics at Harvard and MIT – this program alone was the business incentive to buy a PC and took it out of the garage and into the office.
Anyhow, going back to IBM, it soon dawned on the mainframe giant that it too needed to build and sell its own version of a PC. So it set about designing one. It built the first PC as we know it out of commonly available components, some from chip manufacturer Intel, except for one chip which was IBM’s own intellectual property. What it now sought was an “easy to use” operating system. Step forward Bill Gates at fledgling software programming company Microsoft. When the big boys from IBM arrived at Bill’s office they mistook him for the office junior! However once the intro’s had been made, they all sat down to business. The conversation can probably be summed up as:
IBM: “we need an operating system for our new desktop PC. Do you have one?”
Bill Gates:” No, we only do Basic programming. There’s a small company up the road though. I think they’ve got something you could use. I’ll give you their number if you like”
IBM: “Ok, thanks, and goodbye”
The IBM execs left for “company up the road”. However the owner was out flying his plane. Apparently his wife tried but couldn’t get him to come home. So the IBM execs returned to Bill at Microsoft.
Having mistakenly shooed IBM away the first time, Bill was much more on the ball when they came back. He said yes this time, and went out and bought a system from a local company, called QDOS (apparently short for “Quick and Dirty Operating System”), rebadged it MS-DOS and sold it to IBM for their perpetual use for something paltry like a one-time cost of $50,000. Another moment of misjudgement by Bill Gates who undersold it.
However the Computer Gods continued to smile on him. Firstly IBM didn’t stipulate an exclusive use of the operating system and this together with a completely independent set of events gave Bill Gates another chance to get back into the game.
Some US investors, realising the potential of the PC, got involved with a new company called Compaq, which was created to manufacture and sell desktop PC’s. They legally cloned the IBM PC. But there was that one proprietary chip that IBM owned which couldn’t be copied. So the engineers at Compaq, under oath that they had no inside knowledge of the IBM chip, set about reverse-engineering it; they legally created their own version of this IBM chip, and thereby completed their own IBM PC clone. Other PC manufacturers soon followed. And they all turned to Bill Gates to provide the same operating system he had provided to IBM, but this time on a license basis, making Microsoft a very wealthy company and Bill Gates the richest man in the world.
Apple meantime, lost their way, trying to compete with Microsoft in the mass market until the introduction of the iPod and the iPad saw them return as one of the biggest technology companies in the world; they had always been recognised as the most innovative.
So next time you sit in front of your computer, don’t just regard it as a utility but rejoice in the disjointed events, accidents, stupidity and naivety, sweat and vision, that went into producing it and imagine the world without it.
