Happy 25th Birthday, IBM PC

It was 25 years ago today, August 12th, 1981. The IBM PC, also known as the Model 5150, was born. Other personal computers exists, notably the Apple II and the Atari 800, but it was the open architecture of the IBM PC that made cloning possible ... and it was cloning that eventually made the PC a standard.

It affected me as well. I purchased an early model with dual floppy drives. I remember the grinding of the drives as they wrote to 5 1/4 inch diskettes. And that green monochrome display, and an Intel 8088 CPU running at 4.77 Mhz ... not Ghz. Oh, and we could never fill up that 64KB of RAM, could we?

Eventually, I moved out of defense work, which I had been doing, and into personal computer software ... specifically IBM PC software. DOS, at the time, then to Windows eventually.

In the early days I even dabbled in the BIOS, looking deep into the lowest levels of the OS ... working directly in DOS, writing directly to video RAM. Wow. I remember first working with the Norton Utilities ... when they were actually written by Peter Norton.

Of course, things were not smooth sailing all the time. Let's not forget the horrendous PCjr. And PS/2. And OS/2. And of course IBM sold all its PC business to the Lenovo Group in 2005, so it no longer even makes PCs.

Still, without the IBM PC, things would be very different today. So Happy Birthday, Model 5150. We owe a lot to you.

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