Re: antitrust history, The Design of Design

According to Tim Rentsch  <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com>:

Sounds reasonable, and the reverse of what they did in the
(far-away) past.

>
IBM was forced to change what it did in the past as a
consequence of an antitrust action filed by the US
government.  And in fact there was more than one of
those.

That's true but they didn't have that much practical effect.

The 1956 agreement required that they sell equipment, rather than only
leasing it, let customers buy their cards from vendors other than IBM,
and some other related stuff. A big deal then, irrelevant now.

In 1969 they preemptively unbundled software and services, expecting
that an antitrust suit could force them to do so. There were many of
antitrust suits through 1982, all of which IBM won or were dismissed.

Telex (a company unrelated to the Western Union telex) won a narrow
case about peripheral interfaces, but lost on appeal. Around the same
time there was an EU case that IBM settled and agreed to publish
device interfaces, which was basically what Telex wanted.

I don't think that any of these had a significant long term effect on
the computer industry. When minicomputers appeared IBM never competed
very successfully (nobody would have bought a slow expensive IBM 1130
if IBM didn't make it), and when micros came along they had a short
term success with the IBM PC but soon lost control of that market.

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