IBM is putting its PC business on the block, according to the front page of today's New York Times.
I can still remember getting my hands on an early model IBM PC in the offices of the American Lawyer magazine in 1982 or so. A chunky gray box, it ran a version of Basic just similar enough to the one I'd learned as a teenager that I could write programs for it to process survey results. It used perhaps the world's worst text editor, a hilariously clumsy thing called EDLIN. (Hey, it's still there buried in the lizard brain of the Windows 2000 system I currently use ---just open a command-line box and see for yourself! But only on a file that you can mangle without fear.)
There were many things about that computer that, like EDLIN, made no sense. But it had enough going for it that you could make it do useful things. And that helped me pay my bills at a time when freelance writing was not doing the trick.
The history of those early PC days is well known: IBM let Microsoft control the operating system and gave away the store. IBM's choice of an open architecture allowed it to swamp Apple in the marketplace but let Compaq, Dell and other lower-cost vendors steal the hardware business out from under it.
Most of the choices that led IBM to this point today were made in those early-'80s years. But it's still too bad to see IBM give up.
I've relied on IBM laptops for most of the last decade. The company's hardware standards remain high: The lightweight "X" series, with the integrated pointer (I far prefer this to the more common trackpad) and a great keyboard, is still the best portable machine out there, in my opinion. (Before you Mac fanatics weigh in: Yes, I know, Macs are great, OSX is mostly wonderful, but Apple's laptop hardware has had its share of trouble through the years.)
Across many years and several models, I've relied on IBM Thinkpads to keep my data safe, and I have never lost an ounce of my work to hard drive failure or other hardware problems. I know the manufacturing of these products long ago moved overseas, but it still seemed to make a difference that IBM had a tradition of people maintaining some quality standards. They did, after all, have a reputation to maintain. Let's hope whoever buys the business thinks the same way.
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