Re: market power, What is an N-bit machine?

According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid>:

Apples and oranges. IBM had fewer but much larger customer
organisations, and could not afford to upset them much.

>
IBM had legendary market power, all the way up to monopoly status.
Whatever it decreed, its market had to follow.

Only up to a point. It was quite a challenge for IBM to get their 70xx and 14xx
customers to switch to S/360. That's why most 360 models had emulator firmware
that would make them behave like faster versions of the earlier machines.

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