I was working at IBM in Boca Raton in 1990-91 when OS/2 was being developed. Wandering the hallways one afternoon, I passed by the OS/2 team where I overheard one engineer explaining to another engineer, "See, when you drag a file to the trash can, it should be a Move operation, not a Copy." I thought, OMG, this project is hosed. This was just a few months before it was supposed to be released.
The first release of OS/2 was a complete disaster. IBM was inundated with calls from customers who were having issues. They pulled every single person on the site into service as customer reps, without any training in OS/2! I was working on a UNIX project at the time and I was an Apple person - I had no clue how to help people with OS/2 or PCs but my manager did not like it when I tried to explain that. So I probably am listed somewhere as the worst OS/2 customer support person ever.
Wandering the hallways one afternoon, I passed by the OS/2 team where I overheard one engineer explaining to another engineer, "See, when you drag a file to the trash can, it should be a Move operation, not a Copy."
But you didn't hear the other engineer respond, "No, no, you don't understand. This is an advanced prototype using functional programming. Moving the document to the trash would have side effects. Creating a copy and placing that in the trash can, however..."
Arguably they could have avoided Microsoft "betrayal" as well. Ultimately, Windows 3.0 was a skunkworks project of single engineer against the corporate decisions of Microsoft, and only when it was quite closer to complete did it start getting management buy-in.
Pretty sure for a long time it was "cloaked" as stop-gap solution, a continuation of the lesser-known "windows runtime embedded in application" option that some software shipped with.
They had different goals. But it's not clear that Microsoft's goals--a largely hardware-independent OS--ever made sense for IBM. As it turned out, a more proprietary PC architecture didn't really make sense for IBM either but that was sort of beside the point.
The Model M came with the IBM PC/AT, years after the original PC and subsequent PC/XT. Those came with the Model F keyboard which had a terrible layout.
The Model F sucked. The key mechanism was fantastic, but the layout was utter trash. The weird return key that's long vertically but has a one-key-sized raised section in the middle is the worst part of it.
You can buy brand-new keyboards with this mechanism now from some small business (sorry, don't have a link handy), but even they offer Model M-like layouts because the original Model F layout is so awful.
The only good thing I can say about the Model F layout is that almost all microcomputers at that time had terrible keyboards, though the reasons they were terrible varied. Compared to junk like the Atari computer keyboards, it probably seemed great, though of course the IBM PC was far more expensive. For really great keyboards, at that time, you had to look at the business-level terminal keyboards and such.
Downside of how much tech has changed is stuff gets missed in a copy edit because the numbers sound so silly (to modern ears) they assume I haven't screwed up a typo or find/replace.
Something I didn't have space to mention in the piece was that during the recession of the early eighties, Vector went out of their way to support their dealer network.
They offered loans and let dealers delay payments on deliveries to get them through the tough times.
It arguably cost them ground against IBM because it squeezed them further financially. But it was also another reason the Dealer network remained fiercely loyal to Vector - especially under Harp.
Thanks for the article. Benji Edwards's earlier article was the first time I really became aware of Vector's existence. There are noticeably fewer mentions of the company in Freiberger and Swaine's Fire in the Valley (1984) than, say, Cromemco, and far fewer than IMSAI.
If Every commission 'season two' of this series, then I'll likely focus on figures from the software side of Silicon Valley. Steve makes that list in a heartbeat.
Yeah - one thing that didn't make the edit unfortunately was a few paragraphs on this. They'll make the book chapter though, when I write that.
It was one reason I wanted to tackle Osborne first in the series - because Vector did, quite legitimately, Osborne Effect themselves with the 4. Which absolutely didn't help.
I only mention it briefly in the piece, but Osborne were already working on an IBM compatible machine (codenamed the 'Wayne') when the company went under. It wasn't one of the things Osborne himself managed to retain the rights to. He kept the 'Vixen' design and eventually released a variant of that to limited success.
As usual, Osborne had spotted the direction of travel and was preparing to adapt to it through IBM Compatibility. But by that point the company (and R&D within it) was such a mess that the Wayne wasn't very far advanced.
Wouldn't surprise me if some minor elements from its development ended up in future Compaq machines - or at least were used to cross-check their own work - but not much.
The level of foot-shooting by IBM on that one was ridiculous.