Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Where did Bytes Come From? - Computerphile" video.

  1. 9:00 “Sheer speed” of IBM’s hardware!? Somewhere, Seymour Cray is going “HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!”
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  2. 5:31 Slight irony in IBM’s dominance, though: the most popular programming language for commercial applications was COBOL, which IBM wasn’t really keen on. It kept trying to push its customers to use its own “Commercial Translator”, but they kept pushing back and insisting on COBOL. So finally it had to give way. COBOL was also one of the first “portable” (or at least, largely portable) languages. So a nice side effect of its dominance was that it weakened vendors’ lock-in of their customers.
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  3. 9:12 DEC were able to do the same sort of thing, a little bit later, at a fraction of the cost: the PDP-11 was their first byte-addressable machine.
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  4. 10:03 Didn’t stop them running a FUD campaign against CDC, though. “Just wait for the 360/90,” they kept telling prospective customers. “It’ll leave the CDC 6600 in the dust. When’s it coming out? Soon.” Only it was two years late and completely failed to deliver the promised performance.
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