The machine that changed the world - the IBM PC - turns 30 this week

[n2doc]

IBM may have been out of the personal computing business for some time, but 30 years ago it kicked off a revolution by bringing small, affordable computers to the masses.

Yeah, there were other PCs before the IBM PC - originally known by its numeric moniker, the 5150 - but the strategy of using off-the-shelf, interchangeable parts to build a personal computer was an innovative one at the time. Ironically, that approach also proved to be IBM's undoing, as it quickly spawned a slew of competitors who copied its design and sold systems for much less.

In a post on the official Microsoft blog, Frank X. Shaw - the company's VP of corporate communications - waxes nostalgic about the event, which also happened to put his company on the map.

History is made in the moment but defined over time, and through that lens, it's clear that 30 years ago, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City on Aug. 12, 1981, was a seminal moment. Why? It was the unveiling of the IBM 5150 personal computer.



Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/hottopics/detail?entry_id=95174

[Gregorian]

1. That's something I would like to forget.Config.sys Autoexec.bat

And the programs. Oh my god. My dad and I ran an electronics company using one of these. To do graphics for advertising was like enduring a torture session. We must have been some of the first users of these machines.

I'll always remember how welcomed it was when Norton came out with QuickDos.

ARGH!

[theoldman]

2. And the size of that hard drive.

I forgot if it was 5 or 10 megabytes.

[MineralMan]

3. The first ones had no hard drive at all. Not until the PC XT did

IBM ship a PC with a hard drive. If I remember correctly it was 10 MB. My first Epson Equity II PC clone had two 5.25 floppies and no hard drive. It did have 1 MB of RAM, so I configured 360K of it to be a RAM drive, and kept Microsoft Word 1.1 for DOS on that ram drive, after using a subterfuge to bypass the copy protection. With the Hercules Graphics card, I could even see italics and boldfacing on the monitor! It was the Bomb! Flight Simulator compatible, of course.

With a Daisy Wheel Printer, I was set. I wrote a book on woodworking on it, and mailed it to the publisher on those floppies.

Those were heady times.

[Confusious]

4. Good lord you're old :)

I had an Apple 2e. Still have it, Don't use it though.

I heard about the "ancient" days of computers from a teacher of mine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#IBM_350

[Ready4Change]

5. "He who speaks of Floppy Disk Drives."

http://Youtube ad referencing the old days.

I too am an 'elder.' I installed a few of those double height (4" tall) 5 and 10 MB drives. People would gather around to watch, like a Saturn 5 was rolling out of the assembly building or something. Funny to remember that now. Then came the half height 20MBs.

The original PCs were built like tractors. Tough, but quickly overrun by thousands of hot young PC Clone shops. IBM had some good products since then (and some notable flops) but never regained that initial prominence they had in the aptly named PC market.

Todays machines are so much better, in every way, I cannot in full awareness say I miss those days. But I can say I miss that fact that, back then, it was possible to know EVERYTHING about how the machine worked. Not so, today, even if you built your own machine from scratch.

I swear, when a computer intelligence emerges to take over the world, it won't be some DOD weapon system run amok. It will instead be some critter spontaneously born out of the un-noticed cruft inside all our PCs, and it will have been alive for years before anyone notices.

[MineralMan]

6. I'm older than you think. In 1963, when I went off to college

as an electronics engineering major, one of the classes I took was computer programming. The computer was an IBM 1620, and we used punch cards and Fortran. Now, that was a long, long time ago in the computer world.

[Igel]

7. Where I worked got some of the first PCs.

No hard drive. A while later "smart cards" came out to retrofit them with 10 MB hard drives.

10 MB. Hilarious.

We were early adopters of technology.

We also had a fairly primitive LAN with some sort of cards and cabling soon after it came out.

And we were among the first owners of a laser printer in town. We got it and my boss said, "Print something." We didn't have any postscript-compatible software. That wasn't released for another couple of months. Until then, I wrote postscript programs to produce letters. This was *not* a time-saver.

Neither was the editor/mark-up + compiler pair of programs we finally got. All the mark up for italics and bold, etc., in a crappy text editor; then a second program would interpret that and translate it into a Postscript program for the printer. (It scared the printer we used. She took a loupe to it and realized we'd have virtually nothing else typeset. Ever. And it would spread. Six months later they had a graphic designer and other folk for "value added" printing.)

Oddly, it was a church that most here would call "fundie" and therefore anti-knowledge and Luddite.

[pokerfan]

8. 5150 (Involuntary psychiatric hold)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5150_%28Involuntary_psychiatric_hold%29