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The beginnings of the PC revolution (photos)

I still have an old IBM PS-1 with dual floppy drives, one 5.25 drive and one 3.5 drive. Still works even though I'm mistreated it badly, relegating it to the garage for years and years along with its Timex Sinclair and TI-994A companions. I wish IBM had stayed in the PC business. I thought they had something of value to offer. Same with Texas Instruments.

Not so much because they where good but because the team at IBM who where tasked with selling them where complete idiots initially.

I had a guy who shot one with 2 barrels of a 12 Gage and the PC side staff ran away and hid in fear of their lives. Well at least the Head of the department did and they went looking for a Management Grade Tech to fix the problem.

The unit suffered from what would now be called a Undocumented Feature which meant that the Destruction Manual that came with it was wrong. You shouldn't give people with a Short Fuse the wrong Directions to do something and then wonder why they react badly.

That was my first contact with the play toys that the company was selling and I didn't like them all that much then let alone now.

Col

How was this the beginnings of the PC revolution?! The TRS-80 from Radio Shack and the Apple II were already popular and being used by many businesses.

...that there were personal computers long before the IBM-PC came along.

But none had the presence of the name IBM. Apple at that time was a fruit, unknown to anyone outside the (very small) computing fraternity. IBM gave the industry a boost as their name was known to most business people.

PCs as useful business tools were comparatively well established by the time the IBM-PC hit the marketplace. (Hence the rush to get the PC to market) In fact, Time Magazine's "Man of the Year" was "The Computer", mere months after the release of the first IBM-PC.

What IBM did was make it safe for middle-management-types in large companies to submit purchase orders for these new-fangled machines that the IT types of the moment had yet to take seriously.

Prior to the launch of the IBM PC, very few businesses used PCs as normal business tools, they were mostly used in accounting and research. After the launch, PC sales went exponential, because the IBM name made people take them seriously. Which is why IBM was the beginning (not the first) of the computing lifestyle.

In 1981 I was working for a company and we were using Apple IIe to program an interactive games network. We had the first live games network that was broadcast over television. Unfortunately Sony came in and bought it up and killed the technology at the time. All this was done on Apple IIe. I then later used the Commodore 128 to design and program a property management system that ran in a company. So IBM wasn't first!

Not even close. There were many brands on the market that actually worked very well with solid professional accounting software well before IBM. Google up CP/M to find them. We sold the Panasonic range from Matsushita in Australia some year before the IBM launch, and had plenty of competition..

The first computer I learned my first BASIC programming language on was a Commodore VIC-20 with a whopping 5 Kb of RAM and an external TAPE drive! Then I moved on to the Commodore 64, then an Apple ][ plus with 64K two disk drives, only then after did a have a PC Compatible with 640 K of RAM! So the PC was my fourth computer. No way was it the first.

The title says "The beginnings," not "The first."

When IBM made the PC/XT, it made business realise that the PC was a viable platform. Prior to this, there was chaos in the world of personal computers...

Who was it in IBM that allowed the escape of the DOS rights to Microsoft? Was it Estridge?

Gates and Company, already owned the rights to DOS, IBM licensed it from Microsoft.

I have read, but not verified that DOS was a rework of CP/M and was or was not legitimately obtained by Microsoft. I have no way to verify this. The creator of CP/M was killed in a bar incident in Santa Cruz in 1979.

CP/M was the operating system of choice. Really came to fruition with the VisiCalc application.

Gates was licensing this Basic Interpreter to IBM. they knew they needed applications to be built for the platform. Gate was it.

According to a history in Wiki, Gates quickly bought the rights to QDOS and then licensed the OS to IBM. That's after the owner of Digital Research dissed the folks at IBM in favor of a nice long vacation. that's while they were negotiating an NDA of some sort.

Ironic, is it not, that when IBM entered the PC market they did it with a descendant of the Apple II at the very moment that Apple themselves were giving up on the concept of an open machine with expansion slots in favour of a closed machine in which they maximised control over everything.

The result is that IBM are no longer in the PC business - they commoditised themselves out, just as Apple had foreseen. Ironic too, that Apple now have type of brand image and the reputation for quality and glitz that made people move to IBM in the first place.

The DEC Rainbow was one of, if not, the first dual processor PCs (a Z80 and a 8088) and was on the scene about the same time as the IBM machine. I used one well before I switched to an IBM PC. It is true, though that IBM became the standard for the platform. It wasn't due to innovation so much (DEC was much further ahead) it was because IBM brought it all together at a price point more people were comfortable with at the time. What business could recognize the value in dual CPUs (not as they are today) when most didn't even have a PC in the first place?

The Rainbow was so bad, you couldn't take at diskette and use it between two computers and expect it to work. They just didn't work. Most of them I saw ended up in closets until they were sold for scrap.

I liked mine (at the time). I never had any diskette issues with mine. In fact, I bought a program that allowed me to write disks into about 60 other formats that existed at the time (Radshack, Northstar, Kaypro, Epson, etc.) A few years later many did end up in closets, etc. but a lot of that was due to then being about $1000 more than the IBM PC which eventually won out for that very reason (IMO). Iwas actually able to sell mine to a college (for their lab) for the cost of $1500. Sounds good till you consider I paid nearly $3500 for it just a few years earlier.

The IBM machine was not the first PC. And who has ever called Mr. Estridge, "the father of the PC?" While ethnocentrism may be good for the USA ego, the Commodore PET was introduced in the 1970s and it wouldn't surprise me if others were introduced before.

In 1980 we were building an accounting system under CP/M using Apple II, Victor 9000 (probably the fastest PC at the time) a suitcase sized Compaq and an Osborne - no IBM PC in sight after it was launched - much too expensive.
Unfortunately the guy picking the OS technology never saw DOS as an option and kept on CP/M and we got run over in almost no time as DOS took over! Flight Simulator as the test for "PC compatibility" and we all had to fall in line as IBM managed their sheeple and took over. Apple then stumbled with the Lisa and IBM had free rein
Had to go back to corporate life but it was fun.

I still have (2) Apple IIe and a Timex Sinclair that I used for several years many years ago.

no doubt, there were other, useful products at the time, when ibm started to sell computers called pc.

but. butbutbut.

besides creating a product ibm did a strange series of legal steps.
i am really eager to read about their original intentions behind that (doubt i ever could ...)

for the outsider, like me it looked like this:
- the company elaborated the whole architecture
- they did all the possible legal steps to legally register protection for any tiny details of the intellectual properties they included in the product
- they did not take to no court no none nothing company whichever - by violating their intellectual property rights regarding to the protect - started to sell their products, which often were called "compatible". by the way, can anyone remember those (if more than that one i really know of) companies which signed a contract with ibm to produce authorized "pc-compatible"s. (see the difference ?) ?

and this is where the essence of this story lies.
an arhcitecture, that is protected from falling apart in its logic with unusual legal and business methods,
an architecture that brought to life countless contributors with their development of any kind of add-on.

the torrent of additional (internal hardware, bios, operating system, software, external hardware) developments, that were made possible by the openly-closed closedly-open architecture was the real (r)evolution, which could have been impossible on the bases of the strict closedness of any other competing architecture existing at the same time

In the early eighties, I worked with a techie to install the first IBM 5100, in aTravel Agency I was working with in Massachusetts. Using thier version of Business Basic, I was able to create a complete Invoicing, Itinerary and ticketing system for them. It was difficult at fit because I had never use Basic before, being a mainframe COBOL analyst. It woked out and they used the system for a number of years and in fact had it upgraded to four disk drives and then to a 5120 unit.
Those were the days of consulting until 3:00am and getting back up at 7:00am to go to my full time job.

I had been using my Osborne1 for months before my friend got his PS 5100 hot of the line. and it was arguabley the start of the (trans)Portable revolution...