Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Why the UK's IBM Failed" video.

  1. 26:10 I was wondering when you were going to mention minicomputers. But I was thinking of the original minicomputers, mainly from the 1960s through to the 1980s, offered by companies like DEC, DG, HP, Perkin-Elmer, Prime and others. They showed that small computers, while less powerful, could be a lot more versatile than big ones.
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  2. 2:51 There is a phrase from this era, when companies would routinely send you these cards for you to send back to them: “do not fold, spindle or mutilate”. It was a reference to the fact that your very identity was tied up in these coded cards.
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  3. I used an ICL 2903 (or was it a 2904) briefly in a summer job over 1979/1980, writing FORTRAN code. You were supposed to submit written coding forms and the data-entry staff would punch your code into cards. I got fed up with their continual typos, so I did it myself. The fact that I could touch-type also helped.
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  4. 29:36 I thought 43xx was more of a midrange. The high-end mainframes were the 308x machines, then later 3090.
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