It seems kind of quaint to recall it now, but when Bill Gates was still in high school, IBM was the company that competitors viewed with fear and loathing and programmers scorned with mean jokes and constant sniping. IBM was everything Microsoft is today, and more, dominating the entire world of computing by any means necessary.

Like Microsoft, IBM didn't always have the best technology, a fact that it admitted to itself in internal documents evaluating its own products. But it had market power and knew how to use it. When competitors began to challenge IBM in a particular niche -- disk drives, for example, or computer memory -- IBM delighted in tinkering with its own mainframe operating system or processor hardware so as to make other offerings incompatible. IBM pioneered the practice of "vaporware": announcing hardware and software upgrades years before they would become available, thus frightening off competitors and locking customers in. Most effectively, IBM was a master of "price discrimination," or setting prices low, or below cost, in niches where it faced competition, while raking in profits in arenas where it stood alone or had eliminated all opposition.

And like Microsoft, IBM got into trouble with the antitrust division of the Justice Department. In 1969, the Justice Department filed suit against IBM. The case wound on for 13 agonizing years before an incoming Reagan administration blithely dismissed it in 1981. The IBM trial looms large over the Microsoft proceedings; critics of antitrust enforcement point to its "failure" as proof that antitrust enforcement can't work in the high-tech economy. After all, they note, didn't IBM end up losing its supremacy without the help of government intervention? To none other than Microsoft, that hungry young company running rings around the lumbering behemoth?

Not quite, says Richard DeLamarter, an economist who teaches at Yale University. DeLamarter worked for the Justice Department as an antitrust economist for eight years on the IBM case; he ended up writing a book about IBM in 1986 called "Big Blue: IBM's Use and Abuse of Power." In an interview, DeLamarter explained how the IBM trial influenced and shaped the Microsoft proceedings, and how the two companies are inextricably interlinked, thanks, in no small part, to the efforts of antitrust litigators.

In "Big Blue," your description of IBM's business practices reads a lot like [U.S. District Court] Judge [Thomas Penfield] Jackson's "findings of fact" about Microsoft. Except, of course, the names have been changed. Do you see any significant parallels between the two cases?

The antitrust proceedings are different, because everybody went to school on the IBM case, and they've done things very different this time in order not to have it drawn out. One of the biggest things the DOJ did was hire David Boies [who led IBM's defense]. He was the master of drawing things out, and if he's working on the Department of Justice's side it's sort of harder for Microsoft to do what he did.

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