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I'm talking about the good old days when there were only a hand-full of players, the amount of money involved was relatively small, and companies battled each other solely on the basis of the quality and price of their technology.

Altair was the first off the starting blocks and offered a really bare-bones machine that required the careful hand-assembling of programs, the endless flipping of front-panel switches and the almost clairvoyant interpretation of an array of LEDs before you could determine whether things were working.

Other vendors upped the ante, and names such as Tandy, Ohio Scientific, Columbus, Apple and others entered the marketplace, each offering its own unique and often revolutionary features and benefits.

Yes, they were exciting times and every year, the "Systems" show held at the Auckland Showgrounds would bedazzle visitors with an even more exciting list of differences between machines and software packages.

Then, in about 1981, everything changed.

IBM entered the fray and almost overnight, manufacturers gave up innovating, daring to be different and investing in cutting-edge improvements.

Suddenly the microcomputer became the PC and the whole world turned beige overnight.

The annual "Systems" show became little more than an array of identical Intel x86 boxes, differing only slightly in the shade of beige, the CPU speed and the number of times the word "Turbo" appeared on the case.

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Even today, over 20 years later, nothing has changed much.

Okay, so some vendors like Dell and HP have chosen to replace boring beige with shades of black and silver -- but we're still talking about x86 boxes which differ only in their most minor details.

But what's worse -- that rivalry between vendors based on innovation, performance and price is being replaced by rivalry in the courtrooms.

All to often it seems that whenever some new technology becomes popular and widely accepted -- someone leaps out of the woodwork with a patent in their hands and says "that's my idea, I'm suing".

Let's not even talk about the SCO lawsuit which alleges that Linux contains bits of SCO's proprietary code -- everyone already knows about that.

Let's talk about CD writers instead...

It appears that a company called Optima Technology has begun litigating to protect a patent it says covers the use of a CDR as a virtual disk.

Now maybe this is a reasonable patent claim -- maybe not. Perhaps it's as ridiculous as British Telecom's attempts to recently enforce what it claimed was a patent over the use of hypertext linking but I don't think so.

The sad thing is that the "IBM PCing" of the computer industry has meant that some of the developers of new ideas appear to believe there's now more money to be made from law suits than from actually developing, selling and enhancing their products. That's bad news for everyone :-(

IDG Issues a Warning (too)
It's good to see in today's IDG online there's a story highlighting the risks that Net-neophyte parents are taking by buying little junior an Xbox-live setup for Christmas. I know I covered this last week (and at least Telecom responded to my questions) but I'm surprised that the mainstream media aren't latching on to it.

I know the nice guys over at Consumers Magazine read this column so maybe they'll warn their readers about this before too many of them run up a massive Telecom bill and find themselves without a phone in the New Year because they can't afford to pay.

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