In January 1969, two months after I had turned eighteen, I read that the last official act of Lyndon Johnson’s administration was to bring an antitrust suit against IBM for monopolizing the market for mainframe computers. I was angry. You might wonder why. Was it because the lawsuit would waste resources of both IBM and taxpayers? It did do that, but my anger was more fundamental. IBM had worked hard for its position, and it seemed to me that it was being punished for succeeding and for producing something that companies wanted to buy. “No one gets fired for buying IBM” was a well-known slogan at the time.
