Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog
(Bit of a long post, sorry.)
I'm not sure it's fair to say "What I find interesting is that the technology box focuses on mainframes and lacks any artifacts from the IBM PC (1981), which ended up having much more long-term impact."
IBM, like most very large vendors, was more a group of marginally competing smaller businesses. Each had their own marketing departments, and in this case they wanted to sell mainframes. Why would they include any reference to mini's or PC's? They were, even if made by IBM, the competition. The purpose of this box isn't a historical overview generally, but to guide the recipient customer into thinking that mainframes were the pinnacle of computing technology.
This was about a decade before my time, but I did end up working with and for people who had been in this world. One in particular was memorable, as he had worked in IBM and EDS for the majority of his career, and even though by 1991 he was running a computer center contains DEC/VMS and Sun equipment, he literally referred to them as "toys". I'm not sure he knew what a PC was, and I suspect he thought they were simply terminals. Having met with the IBM salespeople at the time, they would use the same dismissive terminology: "toys", "real computers". Only the baby Cray we owned got this manager's attention, because it was mainframe enough to qualify as a real computer.
This individual ended up purchasing a Fujitsu FACOM mainframe, which from memory cost $500K a year for 5 years in maintenance, decimating the ability of the center to purchase anything else. But to him, this purchase was his proudest achievement, and he brought in photographers to take pictures of him standing next to it.
My point in relating this story is to explain that this person was very much the sort of buyer this kit was targeted at. This individual would never have understood or cared about the contents, nor its historical context, but he would have displayed it proudly on his self as an objet d'art. The whole purpose of this is not to display technology, but to reassure the recipient that buying another IBM mainframe was the only sensible approach.
Two funny follow-ons to this:
1. When the Facom was decommissioned (after I left to work at SGI), they dragged the main processor cabinet out behind the building, and people could make a donation to charity to hack into the thing with an axe. I don't know how much was raised, but I was told that the line was quite long.
2. At SGI, I ended up working with the Fujitsu salesman who had sold this manager the mainframe. I must have reacted really strongly when he mentioned it, as he got really nervous and actually apologized. He said that Fujitsu had presented three options to the moron manager: a mini-mainframe which was in a deskside cabinet and pretty much perfect for their needs, a slightly larger variant which was beyond their budget but about the same physical size, and this old mainframe was supposed to be the ridiculous option no sane person would ever choose. It was way outside the budget, almost at end-of-sale, and actually underpowered. The Fujitsu sales team was horrified when this manager took the ridiculous option, and they tried to talk him out of it. They couldn't: the manager wanted a mainframe, a mainframe was big and a "real computer", and some small deskside server might as well be a "Unix toy".
So I forgave him. :)
Jan 24, 2021, 8:46:47 PM
Posted to Examining a technology sample kit: IBM components from 1948 to 1986