30 Mar
2018
30 Mar
'18
3:01 a.m.
On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 5:19 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Back in the 1960s IBM was facing two antitrust
lawsuits over alleged
attempts to use its dominant market position to freeze the HPTC market
while they attempted to complete and ship the long-delayed System/360
model 90. One lawsuit was brought by the Justice Department and
famously dragged on in court for a decade.
My favorite part of that story is that, IBM instead of sending exactly
what was required by the courts, *i.e*. the minimum possible, the IBM legal
team filled the basement of the justice department in Washing DC with many,
many tractor trailer loads of filling cabinets, mag tapes *etc*. 'Hey, here
you go, you asked for it...'
So IBM is being sued for anti-trust/monopoly position - what does IBM do
next? They send a sales team to Justice and ask if the folks in Justice
wanted to buy computer equipment to examine what they now had in their
possession.
Furthermore, contemporary to the IBM suit, AT&T was also being sued by the
same Justice dept for belief that it was had failed to follow the 1956
consent decree and was using its legal monopoly position with prohibited
actions. AT&T took a rather different approach of giving justice a
exactly the information that was required and no more.
Well, we all know what happened January 8, 1982 - the IBM suit was dropped
and AT&T was broken up.
ᐧ