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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: market power, What is an N-bit machine?
Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2024 02:42:16 -0000 (UTC)
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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.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly