Phew! That was a close one: our attention has been drawn to the fact that back in August 1986 (CI No 505), in a piece entitled The 80386 Time Bomb That Is Ticking Away Under IBM’s Profitability, which forecast that if IBM simply lost 5% to 10% of its mainframe volume to personal computers and servers – and that it would – it would be in deep trouble, we wrote There is no question in the next five years of any major user distributing scores of 80386-based Personals throughout the company and closing the data processing department altogether no, but after under six years, it is just beginning to happen, and the chip is the 80486 and not the 80386…
