A very happy birthday tomorrow
Time to eat some cake -- the IBM PC turns 25 tomorrow.
From Tom Hormby at
Low End Mac comes the story:
What a Legacy! The IBM PC's 25 Year Legacy
IBM was in a time of transition in the early 1970s. The Watson dynasty came to an end in 1971 after 60 years of the Watson family leading IBM.
The man who had managed Data Processing for 20 years, Frank T. Cary, became CEO in 1973 and made radical changed to IBM's corporate structure. Carry split the company into semi-antonymous independent business units (IBUs).
Entry Level
The IBU responsible for low-end minicomputers, The Entry Level Systems (ELS) IBU, was placed in IBM's sprawling facility in Boca Raton, Florida, and tasked with creating new machines that would advance the IBM brand. William Lowe was the first director of the Entry Level Systems IBU.
The two brand new products that the ELS IBU released were the IBM 5100 (released in 1975) and 5120 (released in 1980). Designed as data collection and analysis systems for small labs, the 5100 (above) had an integrated CRT, keyboard, and tape drive. It was capable of running popular software for IBM's mainframes in emulation.
The 5120 was a larger, more expandable version of the 5100 that did not have a built in CRT. Tens of thousands were sold, which was a big success for IBM.
The Microprocessors started coming into their own in the 1970's. The first commercial success was the Altair 8800 in 1975. This success prompted William Lowe to explore the idea of a low-cost computer for businesses and consumers.
'Skirt the Bureaucracy'
The only way to do this, according to William Lowe, was to skirt the IBM bureaucracy. He had two proposals. The first was to buy a microcomputer company outright (he mentioned Atari by name); the other was to create a brand new microcomputer.
The plan was submitted to IBM's Corporate Management Committee (CMC), and it was enthusiastically received. Microcomputers were gaining a foothold in the business world, so CMC asked that a prototype be built for review in a month's time. A small team was established in the ELS IBU to create the prototype.
Bill Snydes, the IBM 5120 manager, was selected to lead the hardware engineering team working on the prototype and was given a staff of 12 engineers. At the time, IBM had no microprocessor ready for release (the predecessor to POWER, the IBM 801, would not be ready for almost two years), so Snydes decided to use the Intel 8088 processor. Though it was a 16-bit processor (meaning that it could handle larger numbers than other microcomputers), it used an older bus design that slowed it down, unlike the more expensive 8086.
Snydes noted in the CMC review that other open and processing standards would be adopted to keep down costs.
Making the system open was a stroke of genius as it allowed anyone to build a plug-in card to work with the computer. We got good graphics, sound, enhanced disk storage, connection to laboratory and industrial equipment within a few years without IBM having to develop anything.
Anyway, Microsoft comes online, VisiCalc and EasyWriter become the first "killer apps" and the rest, as they say, is history.
The final IBM PC was released on August 12, 1981, and it changed the world. Computers with the power of mainframes of the 1960s were now available to small businesses and consumers.
The marketers predicted they would sell 250,000 units over five years, a huge success by IBM standards. By the end of 1983, IBM had sold 750,000 units.
It has been a long fun ride with no signs of slowing down!
Posted by DaveH at August 11, 2006 5:07 PM