Ah, the good old days. Printing out on greenbar. Black and Green screens. DOS programing to do simple calculator work. Swell.
Posted on 08/14/2011 3:23:55 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
THE YEAR WAS 1981, the US defeat in Vietnam was already six years in the past, while many people had only hazy memories of most of the 1970s with its drugs, bellbottom pants and disco craze. Ronald Reagan was US President and it was "Morning in America" once again. And that year IBM introduced its IBM PC model 5150 on 12 August, 30 years ago today.
*************Photo at source***************
The first IBM PC wasn't much by today's standards. It had an Intel 8088 processor that ran at the blazing speed of 4.77MHz. The base memory configuration was all of 16kB expandable all the way up to 256kB, and it had two 5-1/4in, 160kB capacity floppy disk drives but no hard drive.
A keyboard and 12in monochrome monitor were included, with a colour monitor optional. The 5150 ran IBM BASIC in ROM and came with a PC-DOS boot diskette put out by a previously unknown startup software company based out of Seattle named Microsoft.
IBM priced its initial IBM PC at $1,565, and that was a relatively steep price in those days, worth about $5,000 today, give or take a few hundred dollars. In the US in 1981 that was about the cost of a decent used car.
Because the IBM PC was meant to be sold to the general public but IBM didn't have any retail stores, the company sold it through US catalogue retailer Sears & Roebuck stores.
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Subsequently IBM released follow-on models through 1986 including the PC/XT, the first with an internal hard drive; the PC/AT with an 80286 chip running at 6MHz then 8MHz; the 6MHz XT/286 with zero wait-state memory that was actually faster than the 8MHz PC/AT and (not very) Portable and Convertible models; as well as the ill-fated XT/370, AT/370, 3270 PC and 3270/AT mainframe terminal emulators, plus the unsuccessful PC Jr.
In 1983 Compaq Computer reverse engineered the IBM PC BIOS, beginning the era of IBM compatible PCs with its Compaq Portable suitcase PC.
IBM attempted to keep the PC market for itself by introducing its Micro-Channel Architecture, but the buying public rejected it. Soon other vendors joined the PC hardware market, applications software like Visicalc and the Lotus 123 spreadsheet programs and the Wordperfect word processing application appeared, and the IBM PC based personal computing industry took off and never looked back.
But today, after 30 years of development and untold billions of dollars in hardware and software sales, we can remember this date. µ
Ah, the good old days. Printing out on greenbar. Black and Green screens. DOS programing to do simple calculator work. Swell.
Seems like in tech it’s never good to be first, you always want to swoop in later once the market has been defined. Also IBM seemed to have a talent for getting the key strategy wrong, for the most part.
IBM always made the best keyboards — computer or typewriter. The click was as perfect a typing tool as ever invented.
When God was President. That use to drive my lib father crazy, I would call Reagan God, and it would drive him nuts. lol. Hey, I was proven right.
And how long was it before Al Gore invented the internet?
IBM also gave us Ross Perot.
That is stretching things a bit....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80
TRS-80 was Tandy Corporation's desktop microcomputer model line, sold through Tandy's Radio Shack stores in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first units, ordered unseen, were delivered in November 1977, and rolled out to the stores the third week of December.
I had a PC Jr. also, it was a choice between that or an Apple Macintosh, whatever that was. I figured IBM was a safer bet, they would always have software for their computers. Did I ever get screwed on that one! Not only did they quit making software for it but when I got it I got it with a word processing program on floppy disc. They said to make a back up copy of the program right away and when I did I accidentally copied the blank disc onto the program disc. IBM told me that was my problem and refused to send me another disc. You can guess how many IBM products I have bought since then. It’s been nothing but Apple ever since and I couldn’t be happier.
$5000? I recently bought a new laptop for work. For that same $5000 I could buy a computer with 6 GB of RAM, 600GB Hard Disk and an i5 processor. Then I could buy another 7 of them.
When I look at those prices I am even more impressed that my high school bought a dozen of them for computer programming classes.
I had a PC class on college on a 5150. The textbook came with a single floppy disk that had a word processor, spreadsheet and some other program on it. No hard drive. Needed to save everything on anotehr floppy, hence, two disk drives
I still have one of those printers if anybody needs one. The ribbon might be a little dried up by now though.
Looks like the same keyboard as on IBM Selectrics.
That picture has been around for a long time too!
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