LaPlante, Alice and Ed Scannell. 1989. "View from the Top." Infoworld 11: 40 (2 October): pp. 53-60.
53: At a panel session in October 1981, Philip "Don" Estridge, head of IBM's newly formed entry systems division told this gathering of "the chiefs from major microcomputer tribes" that IBM would probably sell 250,000 PCs during the machine's estimated 5 year product cycle.
IBM wanted to prove him wrong. They believed that nobody had any use for small computers.
"j.f. noonan" wrote:
> On Tue, 29 May 2001, Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
> > But, Roca Raton? Now there is a light in the world of
> > knowledge in print. Boca Raton, must be like what the Athens
> > of Florida, right?
>
> Boca Raton is also the birthplace of the IBM PC.
>
> The story goes that a) the engineers that wanted to do the
> project wanted as far away from Armonk and the mainframe boys as
> possible so the mainframe boys wouldn't fuck it up. and b)
> Corporate wanted the PC group as far away as possible so when
> the project failed they could say it happened someplace else.
>
> At some point they folded the unit back into the main
> corporation, I think around the time of the blecherous PS/2 line
> and the proprietary MCA buss. That would certainly be
> consistent with the move back to mainline IBM. (I've got my
> original IBM PC/AT (second generation IBM PC -- based on the
> i286 rather than 8086) Techinical Reference Manual (1985) on
> the shelf here and it has an address of Boca Raton listed on the
> copyright page.)
>
> --
>
> Joseph Noonan
> Houston, TX
> jfn1 at msc.com
--
Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu