Why the IBM computer was the beginning of the end

For veteran Guardian journalist Jack Schofield – sadly no longer with us – the end was written in plain letters once IBM created the Personal Computer. It highlighted a flaw in the business plan of every single computer maker of the 1980s: to keep going as a company, you needed to have hit after hit after hit.

“Commodore had a hit with the VIC-20, and then a bigger hit with a Commodore 64,” he said in late 2019. “And after that it was bust. So I predicted that all of these companies would go bust because they couldn’t hit a winner every single time. They might get one, they might get two, they might even get three in a row. But ultimately, they were all doomed because they couldn’t get ten in a row.”

What’s more, companies didn’t help themselves by their lack of backwards compatibility. “The logical inference at the time was that the IBM PC was going to sweep the world, because you didn’t have new blockbuster machines, you just upgrade the old ones. And in fact, out of Hong Kong at the time, there was a continuous stream of improvements via plug-in cards and add-ons that gradually got incorporated into the build, as it were. And this strategy of continuous improvement meant you could run the same software, because, you know, companies were willing to support software for a successful machine.”

The IBM PC was also a sign of an industry growing up. “When we started out, there was kind of a novelty in owning a computer,” recalled Schofield, “and you were expected to write your own little programs. But once games became established, the computer became just a vehicle for running software. So if you didn’t have software, you didn’t have a computer that was worth anything. And you didn’t have software unless the software houses believed in the future of your machine.”

This was particularly bad news for the British computer manufacturers if they insisted on creating proprietary systems. “All of the British machines seemed to me to be doomed because they had no future development prospects.”