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Raymond Ma

A five-minute primer on  an issue making headlines

Exactly a quarter of a century ago yesterday, the IBM Personal Computer was born.

Was this the first?

No, personal computer (PC) was a generic term before the IBM Personal Computer was introduced on August 12, 1981. It was used as early as 1973 to characterise the Xerox PARC's (Palo Alto Research Centre) Alto, which was built but never commercialised, and the Altair 8800 in 1975,  sold in kit form for assembly.

So what's the big deal?

The IBM PC was the original version  of the IBM PC-compatible hardware platform, which makes up the  majority of small computers used today. Originally marketed as a business machine for word-processing, spreadsheet and database functions, it failed in the home-computing market. But the machine caught on with middle managers, who could afford the US$1,565 price tag, and the machine became a hit.

And because it was built using off-the-shelf components, a slew of clones from rival computer firms such as Compaq, Xerox, Wang, Digital and Sanyo also soon appeared on the market, quickly making the IBM PC the dominant hardware platform.

But I have a PC and it's not IBM.

A series of commercial flops in the 1980s led IBM to lose influence, leading clone-makers increasingly to focus on  getting their machines compatible with a combination of the operating system written by Bill Gates' Microsoft Corp and Intel's  microprocessors,  rather than to IBM computers.

Today, most PCs are assembled by small local companies using standardised components and a handful of larger firms such as Dell and Hewlett Packard.

Meanwhile, IBM stopped  making PCs  in April last year. It sold that unit to Chinese computer maker Lenovo in a controversial transaction that had US lawmakers arguing at the time that the sale could pose a threat to national security.

What was the original PC like?

The price tag bought a system unit, a keyboard and  colour graphics capability. Options included a display, a printer and two diskette drives. There was no mouse but a joystick could be attached to play games. Its paltry memory of 16K (16,000 bytes) was one-62,500th of that of the 1GB (1 billion bytes) not uncommon in PCs  today. There was no hard drive and storage was  in the  small-capacity 160K 5.25 inch floppy disks, which were prone to damage whenever they were bent. Another storage option involved the  equally troublesome magnetic cassette tapes. The screen was a 7kg  monochromatic tube and showed all text and blocky graphics in an eerie green.

I assume these relics

have all been retired?

As of June this year, original IBM PCs and marginally newer XT models are still in use at   most  US National Weather Service upper-air observing sites. They  process data  from the ascending  probes attached to a weather balloon. They are being phased out and will  be replaced.

Anything else special

about the original IBM PC?

It was named 'Person of the Year' for 1982 in the January 3, 1983, issue of Time Magazine.



25 years of the IBM Personal Computer