ANALYSIS TECH WARS


The biggest bust-ups in tech


Since its beginnings, the IT industry has seen a huge number of lawsuits and corporate clashes as the market has changed and technology has progressed. Matt Grainger takes a retrospective look at some of the greatest and most influential disputes in IT history…


Novell in networking, Seagate in disk drives and HP in printers.


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Honeywell Corporation vs Sperry Rand Corporation, 1973 They’re not exactly household names any more but the 1973 Honeywell vs Sperry Rand lawsuit is possibly the most important court case in the history of computing. It centred around a vast machine, developed for the US military and weighing an estimated 30 tonnes, known as the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). Sperry Rand held the patent for this gargantuan device and filed charges of infringement against Honeywell. However, Honeywell managed to submit a countersuit alleging monopoly and fraud, just minutes ahead of its rival. This development was vital, as it enabled Honeywell to have the case heard in Minnesota, where at the time it was the state’s largest employer, whereas Sperry Rand wanted the case to be tried in Washington DC, which was perceived as more sympathetic towards rights-holders. The subsequent trial – which


followed six years of legislation – was the longest in the history of the US federal courts at the time, featuring direct testimony from 77 witnesses,


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depositions from a further 80 witnesses and producing a trial transcript over 20,000 pages long. The end result was that Sperry Rand’s patent was invalidated, as it was deemed to have attempted to create a monopoly after agreeing to share its patents with IBM. This decision put the invention of the electronic digital computer firmly in to the public domain. Just think, if Honeywell had filed its suit a few minutes later, we could all still be paying royalties to Sperry Rand.


IBM vs The World, 1970-1990 In the early 1970s IBM had been a colossus of the IT world for over a decade and had brought a number of innovations to market, including the world’s first hard and floppy disks, as well as the magnetic strip technology used in credit cards. However, things weren’t always easy


for Big Blue. When IBM tried to enter the copier market, it was immediately sued by Xerox for patent infringement. At that time, Xerox used selenium as a photoconductor, whereas IBM had developed an organic compound that avoided Xerox’s patents. Although it


won the litigation, IBM withdrew from the market a few years later. However, its organic photoconductors are still widely used in copiers today. Despite being complicit in the monopoly allegations of the Honeywell vs Sperry Rand court case, the subsequent invalidation of the ENIAC patents allowed IBM to start building personal computers. However, possibly to avoid further accusations of monopoly, it made the decision not to manufacture its own software and processors, choosing instead to source this technology from two little-known companies called Microsoft and Intel. Within a few years it had lost its


lead in both PC hardware and software, and thanks to its failure to take advantage of a number of its own innovations including RISC architecture and mainframe databases, the gap expanded significantly throughout the 1980s.


By the end of the decade, the


company that had previously covered every aspect of the IT trade found itself trying to compete with a range of companies in various niches – Oracle in databases, Sun in RISC architecture, Microsoft in software,


Apple vs IBM, 1984 The year was 1984, and the Superbowl was showing. An advert came on, which depicted a stream of shuffling futuristic drone workers under the thrall of a sinister Big Brother figure. From the back of the room came running a pneumatic blonde woman, bouncing along in red shorts and a white gym vest, to hurl a sledgehammer into the face of Big Brother. The resulting explosion whitewashed the screen, leaving the following message: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’”. Directed by Ridley Scott, Apple’s


1984 advert is now widely acclaimed as a masterpiece in advertising, and although people now usually assume ‘Big Brother’ to be Microsoft, it was widely interpreted at the time as a representation of IBM. The ad was to launch the new Apple Macintosh, the first computer to feature a graphical user interface, which despite strong initial sales saw its popularity drop as people were turned off by its high price and limited range of software. Although it sold well following the introduction of laser printers that allowed users to make the most of the Macintosh’s graphical capabilities, it wasn’t enough to topple the dominant IBM PC. This limited performance contributed to a developing power struggle in Apple’s upper management, which leads us to…


Steve Jobs vs The Apple Board, 1985-1997 In 1983, Steve Jobs approached the then-president of Pepsi, John Sculley, and asked him if he wanted to “sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?” Sculley had been


>>> January PCR 25


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