This Industry and I Have Come A Long Way

When I first joined Creative Strategies in 1981, the company I co-own now, it was owned by Business International, a global econometric forecasting company. Creative Strategies was their tech arm and we did all of the tech research projects for them and handled any issues related to their work. (side note — during my first visit to Business International HQ in New York, I ran into an African American intern. BI was a mostly white male dominated research company back then but this young man was a Harvard Law School student and the BI management was impressed with him and offered him a summer internship. His name was Barack Obama)

In 1981, there were no PC analysts. Those of us covering computers at that time were mainly analyzing the mini-computer space and the number of analysts who specifically tracked this was fewer than twenty. When IBM introduced the IBM PC in 1981, I was one of three mini-computer analysts within research companies asked to add PCs to our portfolio. If you know the history of the PC you know that, until IBM entered the market, the Apple II dominated but was considered a hobbyist product. But once Visicalc came out on the Apple II, IBM got interested and brought out their first PC. This is how I became involved in the PC industry since IBM tapped Creative Strategies for some of its early research projects. I was able to work with the original PC team in Boca Raton, FL, and watch history in the making. I specifically worked on the early retail marketing strategies as well as contributed to the team that created their first laptops.

Because of Business International’s broad client base, including the US government, Creative Strategies was often asked to get involved with various research projects regarding tech related issues. One day in late 1985, I got a call from the Department of Defense. They had two senior officials coming out to California who wanted to meet with me. I was a young analyst and I could not imagine why they wanted to see me and was told it would be a highly confidential meeting. BI had high level confidential agreements in place with all of our clients so I agreed to the meeting and waited for their visit.

When these folks came to my office they got right to the point. They had seen the news that Intel had just released a new processor known as the 80386 and that it would be used in the next generation of PCs. By 1985, PCs had taken off around the world and Compaq and others had already created IBM PC Clones to compete with IBM. This new chip highly concerned them. In fact, they asked me to privately introduce them to high level Intel officials since they had a message for them. (Ironically in those days, the US government had no contact with PC companies or their component suppliers and, while they knew Intel’s embedded group, they were reluctant to go to them for this intro.)

The message was pretty straight forward. The US was going to restrict the sale of any PC that used an 80386 processor and would not allow it to be exported to a list of  countries that included Russia, China and many others the US government did not want to gain access to these “powerful” PCs that could be used in military projects against the US. So I called up the key Intel contacts I had and told them I had some people in my office interested in meeting with them ASAP. I told them they were from the Department of Defense and it was important. While I had very little clout with Intel in any way, they did know of our work and thankfully agreed to see these two gentlemen.

The idea was to restrict this processor and make sure Intel did not sell this chip to any company that would export to these countries. They felt it would be more effective to nip it in the bud at the component level instead of going to each PC company and controlling it there. It worked. The 80386, 80486 and 80586 were kept under those restrictions for the next four or five years and it did not change until the end of the Cold War. It didn’t get changed in terms of exports to China until much later.

Looking back at this, I am reminded how different it was back then during the early days of the PC and how it is today. I recently saw news that China is now boasting it has the fastest mainframe in the world. And every country has smart phones with at least 30 times the power of the processors that were banned for export  from 1985-1989. When it comes to technology, we have come along way in 30+ years and at the speed of Moore’s Law it will be much different even ten years from now.

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Tim Bajarin

Tim Bajarin is the President of Creative Strategies, Inc. He is recognized as one of the leading industry consultants, analysts and futurists covering the field of personal computers and consumer technology. Mr. Bajarin has been with Creative Strategies since 1981 and has served as a consultant to most of the leading hardware and software vendors in the industry including IBM, Apple, Xerox, Compaq, Dell, AT&T, Microsoft, Polaroid, Lotus, Epson, Toshiba and numerous others.

One thought on “This Industry and I Have Come A Long Way”

  1. I’m sure you’ve had, and are having, a fascinating journey. Wishing you many more years of these travels.

    The amount of innovation in that time is staggering. That anyone could buy a machine, and program it freely, or design add-on cards, made it possible. The “PC Revolution”, warts and all, has greatly changed the world. Mostly for the better.

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