Showing posts with label IBM PC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IBM PC. Show all posts

Aug 16, 2019

IBM PC

On Aug 12, 1981 (38 years ago this week) IBM launched its IBM Personal Computer (IBM 5150) at a starting price of $1,565 for the base model with 16K RAM, a color graphics adapter, and no disc drive. It had 40K of read-only memory and 16K of user memory. Options included a display, a printer, two diskette drives, extra memory, communications, game adapter, and application packages, including text processing. The operating system was from an unknown company at the time, Microsoft.

It was not the first personal computer, but it revolutionized business computing by becoming the first PC to gain widespread adoption by industry and for personal use. It was designed, developed, built, and sold within 12 months - at that time faster than any other hardware product in IBM's history. We have come a long way in a short time.