August 11, 2006
The IBM Personal Computer's 25th Anniversary
Twenty-five years ago, IBM changed the world. It wasn't intentional. When Big Blue announced a microcomputer called the IBM Personal Computer on August 12, 1981, it hoped only to make a nice profit.
An article in today's PCWorld magazine provides an interesting overview of the evolution of the IBM personal computer and how it made a significant impact on our culture. Today, for instance, we call our desktops and laptops PCs, not microcomputers. The vast majority of the ubiquitous machines scattered around our offices and homes are direct descendents of IBM's 25-year-old box.
The article includes some interesting history from the IBM-PC engineer David Bradley, Dan Bricklin, inventor of the spreadsheet and Mitch Kapor who gave us Lotus 1-2-3. It is always interesting to note things that we now take for granted. For example, the article points out "what impressed people in 1981 can seem laughable today. a review of the IBM PC in the October 1981 issue of Byte magazine, he was careful to note: "The system supports both uppercase and lowercase characters." (The original Apple II supported only uppercase characters)
Kapor states that The IBM PC is "clearly the lineal ancestor. Ninety-eight percent of the genes in its DNA are the same, but functionally today's PCs are different."
The best quote in the article came from Bradley when asked if he would have done anything differently? He said, "Yes, indeed. "I would have bought shares of Microsoft and Intel."
Download the original VisiCalc from author Dan Bricklin
A detailed history of the IBM Personal Computer
(from 2001 on its 20th anniversary)
Other Computing History Sites:
The Computing Revolution
(from the Boston Museum of Science)
Computing History 1968-Present
(including hardware, software, games etc)
PS David Bradley devised the "three finger salute" aka Control-Alt-Delete