FREE HISTORY OF COMPUTING COMPANIES LESSON
1957 — Lower the unit of access
DEC, Fairchild, spinouts, and markets incumbents could not see
Lower the unit of access
DEC made computers small and affordable enough for engineers and laboratories to control directly. Fairchild made integrated circuits manufacturable and became the source of a dense spinout network. Both changed the unit of progress: DEC lowered the minimum useful purchase; Fairchild accelerated manufacturing learning and organizational recombination. New entrants often grow by serving users and feedback cycles that an incumbent’s cost structure cannot justify.
A new market appears when an entrant lowers the minimum useful unit of access and shortens the user-to-builder learning loop.
Institutional reconstruction
Compare IBM, DEC, and Fairchild by customer, minimum viable sale, capital need, learning cycle, and complementors. Predict which incumbent processes become liabilities as the unit of access falls.
Trace the scarce resource, coordination mechanism, power boundary, and newly possible failure.