CDC, IBM, MS and DC's Memory

Dave Winer put out one of his DaveNet newsletters tonight suggesting that IE browser be split off from Microsoft as a separate company. He calls it BrowserCo.

It is not a bad idea. And, we're not sure if Dave realized that something similar happened way back in 1968.

Control Data Corporation (CDC) sued IBM for antitrust marketing behavior. Every time CDC introduced a new product, IBM would immediately counter with a product announcement of its own for the same device. And, they did it even if they had not done any work on such a product or were even going to. It was just a way to stifle competition.

The result of the lawsuit was that IBM transferred its subsidiary, Service Bureau Corporation, to Control Data for an insignificant amount. You can read all about that and more CDC history here.

I keep telling you that I am an old fart in this IT business. This helps prove it. I worked for CDC back then as a Customer Engineer on their big bertha computers - the CDC 6600. That machine was awesome. Thanks to a part of the machine called "the stuntbox", it could even perform instructions out of sequence. Instructions were executed in parallel (if possible) due to different hardware being used for adds, multiplies, divides. If you were not waiting on a result from a previous instruction, the next one would be executed.

Who says old computer pros lose their memory?