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.