On August 12 1981, the IBM Personal Computer 5150 arrived in the market and led the revolution that bought computing in to daily life.
This August marks the 35th birthday for this computer. The IBM 5150 came in to the market with a $1,565 price tag, at that time IBM had its entry-level “microcomputer” run $90,000 and looked more like a washer and dryer set.
The history of the IBM personal computer goes a bit like this: when the concept for the computer first came up, a senior executive had asked, “Why would anyone want to take a computer home with them?” Young companies such as Commodore, Apple, Tandy, Atari and Digital Research were already planning on putting together pieces to make personal computers and take computers out of the back offices.
IBM chose systems manager William C. Lowe to create the prototype from which the company’s first PC was born. The project was named ‘Chess’ and IBM went on to Microsoft for the operating system (QDOS, renamed PC-DOS and later sold by Microsoft as MS-DOS) and to Intel ® for its 8088 processor.
Finally on August 12, 1981, the IBM 5150 was introduced at a press conference in New York City, triggering a media frenzy that continued for months. The new computer had 16KB of RAM, no disk drives, several applications—including VisiCalc, a spreadsheet, and EasyWriter, a word processor—and sold for US$1565.
With 35 years now under the belt for this IBM personal computer, it can run for president now!
