Saturday, August 12, 2006

The IBM PC turns 25 years old

10 years of my career from the mid 80's to the mid-90's were spent mostly in Boca Raton FL working at IBM. It was a magical time in the industry when truly revolutionary new stuff was always on the horizon or lurking in a lab somewhere. Half the really amazing toys never made it out of the lab. All the stuff today seems so regular, so uniform, so commoditized. The magic is gone...

I still have a couple of the old 5-slot original 5150 PC's (shown in the pic) tucked away that I'll boot up and play with occasionally.

IBM
When the IBM Personal Computer (IBM 5150) was introduced to the world 25 years ago, it was dramatically clear to most observers that IBM had done something very new and different. Here you had a large company, steeped in tradition, that had been willing and able to set aside its "business as usual" methods to produce in volume a highly competitive, tiny computer of top quality, intended for both consumers and businesses. And IBM was able to do all that and roll out its first PC in just one year...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It is amazing how far along these babies have come in 25 years. Personal computing in general has taken over modern life, and it was because of the IBM PC and its clones that that happened.