To save our energy and health after the RenFest, Jennifer booked a hotel for the night. Brilliant idea. Beats the hell out of driving another three hours back to Austin after walking around all day. Since we stayed nearby, she let me pay my respects to this little restaurant that fueled the personal computer industry and expansion to the people. Plus she bought a delicious pie!
It’s at this restaurant some enterprising people (IBM called them thieves) reverse engineered IBM’s first personal computer. Through their deductions, they found a way to make the same computer for less money and created the corporation Compaq. I think they were students but either way, House of Pies is where they’d get together, drink coffee and eat this joint’s fantastic pies. It was probably one of the only places open 24 hours during Houston’s boomtown days too.
For those who don’t know how it panned out. IBM did sue and lost. With Compaq’s victory, numerous other cloners popped up to flood the market with similar designs to what IBM charged a premium for. Big Blue was helpless because their original product was made in a hurry and used off-the-shelf pieces; they were late to compete with Apple and Tandy. It was practically the same situation when it came to the operating system. Therefore IBM unknowingly gave Intel and Microsoft the means to become humongous, rival competitors within a decade.
Compaq is gone, acquired by HP well over a decade ago. Microsoft isn’t quite the behemoth is used to be. It might have won the lawsuit thanks to an egotistical judge yet Bill Gates lost in the court of public opinion well before his associations with Jeffrey Epstein came to light. IBM endures but it’s more of a consultancy as it shed its manufacturing divisions to the Chinese. House of Pies? They now have four locations around the Houston area and their pies…still awesome!