He disagreed with their technical staff about how to design a mainframe.<p>The technical staff said that the operating system should run on microcode to abstract away the hardware.  That way it would be easier for customers to migrate to new hardware as it became available.  And they could easily add a new instruction if they needed to.<p>Gene said that it would be an order of magnitude faster if it ran directly on the hardware, and it wasn&#x27;t that hard to support that API going forward.<p>Both proved right.  Gene built computers that were massively faster than IBM&#x27;s and perfectly compatible.  IBM then added an instruction in micro-code and made all of their software use it.  Gene&#x27;s installed base all crashed on IBM&#x27;s new code, while IBM&#x27;s was fine.  The US government launched an anti-trust lawsuit, which wound up binding IBM&#x27;s hands for many years after.<p>IBM mainframes today still run on micro-code.  And it still makes them massively slower than they need to be, but with better backwards compatibility.  The mainframe world depends on a lot of programs from the 1960s and 1970s that runs, unchanged, today.  Everyone else is using native instructions and runs faster.