The age of the computer started in the 1950s, and one of the first things that happened to a then relatively tiny IBM was it got nailed by the Department of Justice. The result was competition and the modern age of computing. Last week, the DoJ opened another, very similar, investigation of IBM. It was — you’d never guess — on the mainframe. IBM has really been the only player in the space for some time. Interestingly, there is another vertically integrated company that regularly engages in the same kind of behavior: Apple.
