Thirty years ago today, IBM announced its first PC, the 5150. It wasn’t the best PC of its era, or even the most interesting—but it was surely the most important one. That’s because it spawned a standard that quickly came to dominate the market, and which continues to this day. If you’re reading this on a Windows computer, you’re using a really fancy, highly-refined update to the computer that IBM built.
(PHOTOS: A Brief History of the Computer)
If news of the anniversary puts you in a celebratory mood, may I suggest doing some or all of the following?
1. Visit IBM5150.net.
It’s a nifty site devoted entirely to IBM’s first PC, with vintage ads, commercials, articles, and more. It’ll even tell you how to fix a busted PC.
2. Read InfoWorld’s original coverage.
Thanks to the miracle of Google Books, the entire 1981 issue in which the PC made front-page news is available online. InfoWorld said it was surprised by the PC’s use of a new operating system it called “86-DOS”—you and I know it as MS-DOS. And on the same page with its story on the PC, it reported on Apple’s upcoming Lisa and “McIntosh.”
3. Feast on Creative Computing’s epic 1981 review.
Will Fastie’s story is one of the longest, most thorough evaluations I’ve ever read of anything. He liked it!
4. Contemplate the amazing benefits of Moore’s Law.
Back in 1981, an IBM PC with 128KB of RAM, a monochrome monitor, one floppy disk drive, a printer, and Visicalc cost $6125, or almost $11,000 in 2011 dollars. That’s enough dough to buy 15 Lenovo ThinkPads, the machines that are the closest things to direct descendants of the first PC.
5. Stage a YouTube Chaplin festival.
Or, more precisely, a festival of 1980s IBM PC ads featuring Charlie Chaplin impersonator Bill Scudder. (One’s at the top of this post; here are some more.) For a while, Chaplin was as synonymous with IBM as Steve Jobs is with Apple today. Even the ads for third-party PC-compatible products in computer magazines often had a Little Tramp theme.
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6. Make fun of the IBM PC Jr.
The home-oriented 1984 follow-up to the original PC remains one of the most legendary flops in tech history. When I worked at PC World, we rated it as the thirteenth worst tech product of all time. Mysteriously, though, we didn’t list it among the 10 worst PCs ever.
7. Buy an IBM PC of your very own.
It was an bestseller, and built like a tank, so lots of examples survive. In fact, it’s downright plentiful on eBay. Here’s one with monitor and printer for $495—$4 less than an iPad.
8. Revisit that famous Apple ad.
Apple greeted Big Blue’s entry into the PC market with a full-page Wall Street Journal ad with a memorable headline: “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.” For years, people thought that Apple’s welcoming attitude was sad in retrospect, given that the PC and PC-compatible machines went on to dominate the market. But I dunno: Today, Apple is the most profitable maker of personal computers on the planet, and IBM isn’t in the game at all any more. Apple triumphed—it just took decades.
9. Check out Benj Edwards’ IBM PC Oddities.
Over at my site, Technologizer, Benj rounded up some weird stuff relating to the PC—including the “MacCharlie” add-on that turned a Mac into a PC. And did you know that Bill Gates co-wrote the first PC game?
10. Contemplate a world without the IBM PC.
That’s what I did in this Technologizer post, which speculates on how life today might be different—or not so different—if Big Blue had decided to stick to mainframes.