IBM

The Most Important UI Design Breakthrough Happened in 1965 — and You’ve Never Heard of It

In 1965, an IBM engineer used a mainframe to draw a scatter plot on a CRT screen. That moment — not the iPhone, not the Mac — is the true birth of modern UI and data visualization. We treat design as a recent invention, but the core human-computer interaction leap was solved 60 years ago. Today’s sleek interfaces are just miniaturized echoes of that breakthrough.

The OS/2 Myth: Why Technically Superior Products Lose (and What Really Killed IBM)

OS/2 didn’t fail because it was technically inferior to Windows. It failed because IBM partnered with a company—Microsoft—whose survival depended on OS/2’s failure. This is a masterclass in platform economics: control the ecosystem, not the code. If you’re building a product that depends on a rival’s cooperation, you’ve already lost.