Harry McCracken’s article about IBM’s introduction of the PS/2 and OS/2 (here on the Techland blog) brought back a flood of memories. It was 25 years ago this week:
On April 2, 1987, at twin press conferences in New York and Miami, IBM unveiled its plans to reinvent the PC industry which it had jump-started less than six years earlier with the introduction of the first IBM PC. The company introduced four new computers dubbed the PS/2 line, including an $11,000 model which it said was seven times faster than current models. The new products were rife with advanced features, including 32-bit processors, fancy graphics, 3.5″ hardshell floppy-disk drives and optical storage.
I was there at the event in New York. It was my first or second week on the job at PC Week. Russell Glitman, a veteran at PC Week and an old pal of mine (we’d previously worked together at a daily paper) took me along for my baptism by fire. I’d just joined from the Boston Herald and was brand new to technology. We flew down on what I think was the old Eastern Shuttle, hit the IBM event, which mostly puzzled me, and then Russell led the way to a fancy Indian restaurant where we wined and dined like princes.
It’s hard to explain to young kids now what a blast those early PC years were. The market was booming. Lotus was the biggest software company, but Mitchell Kapor would still talk to you. Philippe Kahn would say outrageous things and play the saxophone at events. Bill Gates dirty-danced with PR flacks at Comdex parties. Microsoft was not yet big and bad and borglike; they were just Microsoft. Roger McNamee was an analyst at T. Rowe Price. Publications like PC Week and PC Mag were making ridiculous amounts of money. On Fridays our ad sales people used to celebrate by filling the water coolers with margaritas. We spent long afternoons in our cubicles playing primitive video games or sleeping off long drunken lunches. We had affairs with colleagues and did bad things in the conference room at night when we thought nobody was still in the office. We did terrible, ridiculous things at Comdex in Las Vegas.
It was probably the most fun I ever had at a job, with some of the best people I ever knew. And not until I saw that article on Techland did I realize that it was 25 years ago. Tempus fugit, as they say in Portuguese.
Not to mention Ashton-Tate! I was one of the PR flacks dancing with Bill at Comdex and doing my best to be on the good side of all those terrific tech journalists. It was the best of times for many of us. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Also in Portugese: sua mosca é baixo – your fly is down.
Thanks for the link (and I didn’t know you knew Russ Glitman, a great guy and one of my mentors).
–Harry
Sometimes I start to get a bit sad about being the ripe old age of 57, but then I think back and I’m sure glad I was involved in the computer business during those amazing times! And it is still a blast all these years later. I would hate to have missed those magical times when it seemed anything was possible, so just go for it. Kind of like now, on the web and app stores, now that I think about it.
I hot sent down to Miami. I took the developer of a well known utility program to lunch and he ate an entire key lime pie.
Sources said.
Namaste
Anon on the Ashram
PS.Do you remember the Thursday closing when you told Susan C you’d “use really big letters to write the really big story” you and Dave were working on?
that and the big Pizza bust were my favorite PCWeek memories, sources said.
The big pizza bust? What was that one? I forget saying that to Susan but I don’t doubt it happened. I do remember Susan saying, “I am a RAW NERVE” one Thursday on deadline. So much stress! We should have just enjoyed ourselves more. Though we did our best during Friday “story meetings” at Ciao Bella on Newbury Street.
Judy: I’d forgotten about Ashton-Tate. But man oh man. I remember visiting and interviewing Ed Esber when A-T was having a meltdown and could not finish some version of dBase — must have been dBase IV. Then Wayne Ratliff left and tried to launch a new database company with Carl Gritzmacher (sp?) — was called Emerald Bay? Wow.
PC Week in the middle of PC revolution was like being on the mountain during some weird harmonic convergence phenomenon during a full eclipse. I’m surprised a book hasn’t been written about the tech press in those days.
The combination of crazed personalities covering a very hot industry, truck loads of advertising dollars, and reporters who would do stuff like climb into Apple’s dumpsters to read their trash, made it a very memorable era. The energy made the dot.com days seem sedate in comparison.
What I remember from the PS/2 launch was IBM inflicting a new bus structure for expansion boards — the infamous MicroChannel. The Microchannel was very unpopular, and was the hardware equivalent of OS/2 — IBM trying to put the genie back in the bottle that it opened up with Microsoft and Intel when it made the PC standard open and easy pickings for Compaq and Dell to clone.
PC Week broke the news a year later that IBM was backing away from the Microchannel and bringing back the classic AT bus that corporate buyers demanded so they could retain their investment in expansion boards. We broke the news on Thursday and by Monday the New York Times and WSJ were attributing the scoop to us. IBM’s flaks swung into spin mode and declared we were flat wrong. Like really wrong.
Pandemonium hit the PC Week newsroom. I got called on the mat by the editor in chief, Sam Whitmore, and told that we were so exposed that we could lose our jobs if we were wrong.
So we re-reported the story. Ran it again the next week. And eventually, the weasels at IBM did indeed restore the AT-bus, but under the moniker of ISA or Industry Standard Architecture. I learned my biggest lesson in journalism from that incident. Stand by your reporters, fact check like crazy, and hold your ground in the face of the Man throwing off FUD.
OS/2? Don’t get me started. The weirdest part was joining IBM’s PC division thirty years later and meeting the product managers who inflicted stuff like Token Ring, SNA and Microchannel on the world.
during one staff meeting off site I think in Atlsnts,I got attacked by she whose phone was made to ring at importnue times when I filed a story saying that IBM would move away from SNA, MCA and token ring.
But “IBM said all were blueprints for the future,” the staffer and an editor said.
They were wrong and our ources were right.
the nig Pizza bust resulted in one staffer eing offered rehab. the conclusion leading up to this management decision was that anyone who didn’t eat pizza was consuming….
It was bizarre.
Dave you are right the era and the magazine as a lab would make a great book.I kinda wish you Dan or Edelhart would pen it.
JimF
“We had affairs with colleagues and did bad things in the conference room at night when we thought nobody was still in the office. We did terrible, ridiculous things at Comdex in Las Vegas.”
… now you’d just be happy to get the container slot open for your set of monday morning pills.
namasté.