What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2085

That's not the same thing, and it is *a* saying, but Eric's free to promulgate a saying of his own, surely? Just because "nobody ever got fired..." is a (somewhat) popular phrase doesn't mean he's wrong about what some people may have believed about IBM.

That's debatable. It was better than the AT bus ("ISA"). IMO it was better than EISA. It was used successfully for several years in the RS-6000 line until it became more practical to switch those over to PCI - but there was no PCI when Microchannel was introduced.

Certainly Microchannel was doomed as the new bus standard for PCs by IBM's ill-considered attempts to use it to regain control of the PC market or at least suck some royalties out of the clone manufacturers. But that wasn't a technical failing. The initial implementation for the PS-2 line used a new, smaller card form factor, which may have been a mistake, but MC-II for the RS-6000 fixed that.

There were a number of busses for micros in compebreastion at the time: ISA, MC, EISA, and a bit later VLB (VESA Local Bus) and PCI. Apple came up with a very fancy bus design called QuickRing which was intended as a second, high-throughput multimedia bus alongside NuBus. I recall considerable suspicion toward the "local bus" designs (VLB and PCI), but eventually PCI won.

But at any rate it's irrelevant to the "nobody ever got fired" saying, the whole point of which is that regardless of the quality of IBM's product, IBM had such a reputation that purchasing it was a safe choice - you couldn't be accused of taking an unnecessary risk if something went wrong.

Now, whether that was true - that IBM equipment was always, or even usually, seen as a sensible and hence blameless choice - is another question. But that's what the cliche is meant to imply.

If anything, it's a dig at IBM, implying that IBM's success in the market was due more to management playing it safe than to any laudable characteristics of the product.

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Then a good friend got very ill, and it made Pernsteiner realize that "life is short. This was an opportunity to be silly."