Sales and Market Reception
The IBM RT had a varied life even from its initial announcement. Most industry watchers considered the RT as "not enough power, too high a price, and too late". Many thought that the RT was part of IBM's Personal Computer line of computers. This confusion started with its initial name, "IBM RT PC". Initially, it seemed that even IBM thought that it was a high end Personal Computer given the initially stunning lack of support that it received from IBM. This could be explained by the sales commission structure the IBM gave the system: salesmen received commissions similar to those for the sale of a PC: not much. With typically configured models priced at $20,000, it was a hard sell, and so the lack of any reasonable commission resulted in a loss of interest by the IBM sales force.
The performance of the RT, in comparison with other contemporaneous Unix workstations, was not outstanding. In particular, the floating point performance was poor, and was scandalized mid-life with the discovery of a bug in the floating point square root routine.
With the RT system's modest processing power (when first announced), and with announcements later that year by some other workstation vendors, industry analysts questioned IBM's directions. AIX for the RT was IBM's second foray into UNIX. (After PC/IX in September 1984.)The lack of software packages and IBM's sometimes lackluster support of AIX, plus the sometimes unusual changes from traditional UNIX operating system defacto standards caused most software suppliers to be slow to embrace the RT and AIX. The RT found its home mostly in the CAD/CAM and CATIA areas, with some inroads into the scientific and educational areas, especially after the announcement of AOS and substantial discounts for the educational community. The RT running the Pick OS also found use as shopping store control systems, given the strong database, accounting system and general business support in the Pick OS. The RT also did well as an interface system between IBM's larger mainframes, due to its SNA and DS support, and some of its point of sale terminals, store control systems and also machine shop control systems.
Approximately 23,000 RTs were sold over the lifetime of the product, with some 4,000 going into IBM internal development and sales organizations. Pick OS sales accounted for about 4,000 units of sales.
Read more about this topic: IBM 6150 RT
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