The IBM PC turns 30 today

[Creole Ned]

Engadget, among others, has a story on the original IBM PC turning 30 today.

From the IBM press release for its debut model, the IBM 5150:

Features: Available with the system are an 83-key adjustable keyboard, up to 262,144 characters of user memory (16,384 standard), a printer that can print in two directions at 80 characters per second, self-testing capabilities that automatically check the system components and a high-speed, 16-bit microprocessor.

The base unit started at a mere $1,565 (in 1981 dollars) "while a more typical system for home or school with a memory of 64,000 bytes, a single diskette drive and its own display would be priced around $3,005. An expanded system for business with color graphics, two diskette drives and a printer would cost about $4,500." Two diskette drives!

Anyone remember using the original IBM PC? I was always an Atari/Commodore guy back in the old days so I didn't get my first PC until 1994. By then I could add a 2X CD-ROM drive (to play Myst) for only $200!

[Fugitive]

I had one of those original 5150s, but as a late adopter, not an early one. When 286s were common and 386s were the new hotness, a friend of the family got me a 5150 system from someone who was getting rid of it, since we couldn't really afford anything decent.

It had a 20MB hard drive, dual 5 1/4" floppy drives, and the full 640kB memory upgrade, which wasn't too shabby. It also had a Hercules graphics card, but there was a TSR program which let it emulate CGA modes, so I was still able to do some decent gaming on it. I also did my earliest C/C++ programming on it, with Borland's compiler.

I don't have it anymore, though. The hard drive eventually failed, and I left it at my mother's place when I moved (damn thing is heavy), and when she did some cleaning before her own move she called me up and asked if I still wanted to keep it and I said nah, go ahead and get rid of it. I sometimes think I should have held on to it though, just as a piece of computing history, but my packrat tendencies are bad enough already...

[mkozlows]

My computing childhood was weird, because my dad had a home-based business, and bought an IBM clone (as they were then called) as our first home computer. 128KB RAM, dual 5/14" floppies, and a monochrome character-only display, no graphics at all.

I played a lot of Zork.

[DennyA]

I wonder where we'd be in personal computers today if IBM hadn't entered the market.

Did the introduction of the PC herald significant advances thanks to its open hardware and operating system architectures?

Or did the horrible memory and expansion design, not to mention primitive early operating systems, stop progress in its tracks? Would we all be running SuperAmigas, NeXT CosmicCubes, and ultra-efficient BeOS PCs now?

[Omniscia]

Where would we be without OS/2 Warp?

[Hanacker]

The first computer I remember using was the PC Jr., which according to Wikipedia, my mom probably got at an employee discount after IBM was trying to unload the stock of the flopped product.

She also sort of tried to push OS/2 on us for a while but that didn't stick very long.

[Brian Rubin]

Wow, amazing. This really takes me back to my original PC days. I was a bit late to the DOS party with a Tandy 1000EX in 1985/86, but I did have an IBM PS/2 in the late 80's. Ah memories...

[Cyrano]

The base unit started at a mere $1,565 (in 1981 dollars) "while a more typical system for home or school with a memory of 64,000 bytes, a single diskette drive and its own display would be priced around $3,005. An expanded system for business with color graphics, two diskette drives and a printer would cost about $4,500." Two diskette drives!

$1565 in 1981 dollars is $3704.77 in 2010 dollars; $3005 is $7113.64; and $4500 is $10652.70! What a bargain.

[AlanT]

Slashdot reprinted a review from back in 1981 - http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/review/209...nal-model-5150

I remember reading that review when it came out, I can even remember where I bought the magazine. I think I may be old.

[SpoofyChop]

My first home PC was an IBM PC XT that my dad brought home from his business in about 1987 or so. (He had upgraded to a PC AT and they didn't need the XT anymore.)

It had a monochrome monitor and an upgraded Hercules Graphics Card that actually allowed me to play Space Quest II in glorious 720x350 green.

Of course I later got an IBM PS/2 Model 30/286 with its even more glorious 256 color MCGA adapter made me neglect and eventually sell that old PC XT.

[Alistair]

However, a mysterious key called Scroll Lock doesn't actually do anything.

Plus ça change...

[Eric T Cheng]

$1565 in 1981 dollars is $3704.77 in 2010 dollars; $3005 is $7113.64; and $4500 is $10652.70! What a bargain.

So the same price as buying a Mac Pro today...

[Case]

Where would we be without OS/2 Warp?

Well, I wouldn't have gotten into epic flame wars with Brad Wardell on Compuserve over Windows versus OS/2 ;-)

[Case]

I didn't buy an original IBM, but I did pick up one of the original Compaq portables. That went through several upgrades, the last being a humongous (!) 10MB (yes, megabyte) hard drive that set me back $600.

[Zylon]

Let's see... my first serious hands-on exposure to IBM PCs was in college, where I was lucky enough to get into a dorm where every room was equipped with a shared PC AT (or possibly XT) with an amber monitor and a Hercules card. Playing Leisure Suit Larry in laggy CGA emulation mode, fun times.

Part of the standard software suite was the Leading Edge Word Processor, the most spectacularly awful piece of shit word processor ever written. It used some sort of proprietary filing system, such that if you ejected your data disk while it was running, all your documents got trashed and you had to go down to the computer lab and have them do a repair on it. This was a great motivator to teach myself WordPerfect.

[Dan_Theman]

My family was an early adopter. We had the original PC, and then later picked up an XT (which was big news because it had a hard drive in it AND we had the math co-processor - the awesomely powerful 8087!!!) and finally an AT. We also had a PS-2, TRS-80, Tandy POS, DEC Rainbow, and various other chunks of hardware before expanding into any architechture I'd consider remotely "modern" (386 and later, in my book).

Anyway, some of my fondest memories of ancient PC involved me and a copy of Jet playing monochromatic war. Wire-frame graphics were never so glorious as they were in those days. I was so hooked on it that I was banned from playing without express permission. My parents would always check to see if I'd played when they weren't watching. First, they attempted to do so by checking the temperature of the monitor ... but I learned to place bags of ice in strategic locations to quickly drop its temp. Then I noticed that my father started checking log files, and my first dalliance into the darker side of computing began - switching the system clock back and forth to try and fool him.

In later years, I learned that he caught onto my trick but that he was so impressed with my problem solving skills on the PC that he pretended not to notice (... of course, he never told my mother about his discovery or decision).

[lesslucid]

It's kind of unbelievable that there's been so much change in 30 years. I'm trying to think of an analogy, something like the captain of an aircraft carrier reminiscing about being a teenager when somebody invented the coracle. Can another 30 years possibly bring about changes of similar magnitude?

[DennyA]

I was using an Amiga and laughing at all of you poor suckers stuck with single-tasking, ugly PC clones, while enjoying my 30-60 fps games and quad-channel digital stereo audio.

I used and wrote about many PCs in the early days, but I never owned one until Windows 95 came out, which finally made them tolerable.

The platform didn't really get good until we got Windows XP, peripherals moved mostly to USB, and you finally could stop dealing with IRQ conflicts. No real complaints since then. :)

But the first 15 years of the PC we were stuck with having to hack around the limitations caused by the horrific 8/16-bit hybrid 8088 chip architecture and its 1MB memory space. I have no fond memories of QEMM386, IRQ conficts, trying to get a second parallel port to work so I could use a printer and scanner, and all that stuff. The original IBM PC was a terrible design and we've only recently gotten almost completely past its legacy with modern PC hardware..

[Creole Ned]

Yeah, I agree, Denny. As I said above my first PC was in 1994 but even then it was still a Windows 3.11/MS-DOS 6.2 machine. I had a batch file written up that gave me a nice list of my games to choose from. I'd choose one and pray I had tweaked the autoexec.bat and config.sys files properly to squeeze out enough ram so the game would actually run. :)

The writing was on the wall by then, though. With DOS extenders, VGA graphics and decent sound the PC was destined to replace my beloved Amiga 500. And Microsoft even came up with a good OS eventually!

[Linoleum]

I recall having to do some informal IT work on a IBM PC 5150 that was still being used...in 1996.

[Cyrano]

Yeah, we laughed at PCs at the Amiga store where I worked until VGA graphics started becoming standard, and Commodore had no answer. Uh oh...

[Zylon]

Yeah, we laughed at PCs at the Amiga store where I worked until VGA graphics started becoming standard, and Commodore had no answer. Uh oh...

The answer was AGA. It just wasn't a sufficiently good answer.

[Linoleum]

I miss big beefy boards loaded with chips.

[Fugitive]

IBM PC, 8088 processor: 29,000 transistors
Intel Core i7-2600: 995,000,000 transistors

[MarchHare]

But the first 15 years of the PC we were stuck with having to hack around the limitations caused by the horrific 8/16-bit hybrid 8088 chip architecture and its 1MB memory space. I have no fond memories of QEMM386, IRQ conficts, trying to get a second parallel port to work so I could use a printer and scanner, and all that stuff. The original IBM PC was a terrible design and we've only recently gotten almost completely past its legacy with modern PC hardware..

You're right, of course, about dealing with all that shit being terrible, but I sort of owe my career to it. If it wasn't for all the time I wasted as a teenager trying to make games work by messing around with autoexec.bat and config.sys, resolving IRQ conflicts, creating boot disks, etc., I probably never would have become an IT professional.

[anaqer]

IBM PC, 8088 processor: 29,000 transistors
Intel Core i7-2600: 995,000,000 transistors

A shitload of that is just cache, though. Doesn't really count.

[dermot]

The answer was AGA. It just wasn't a sufficiently good answer.

It wasn't a sufficiently timely answer - the chipset itself compared favourably with the VGA stuff that was out at the time and was better in some ways. It didn't help that Commodore had no idea what to do with the Amiga platform and were fucked royally by the time the (fantastic) A1200 came out.

Anyway, we'd an Amiga until probably 1994/5 at which point my dad got hold of a PC-compatible through work. I've no recollection of what operating system was on it but I'm guessing it was Windows 3.11 for a period and then Windows 95 shortly thereafter. Actually, thinking about it he may have gone straight to Windows NT since that's what they were running in the company that he worked in IT for at the time (he still works there, actually).

One of my friends' father had a PC from around 1992 onwards that he got for doing Open University course work. My friend was banned from using it and his dad put a lock on it via the BIOS. Of course, I figured out the password (sammy, after the family dog) and we spent many hours when his folks were at work playing that QBasic demo game where the two Gorillas throw bananas at each other.

[KaoFloppy]

Everyone remembers himem, qemm and emm. Nobody remembers Sidekick or the ramdisk utilities that are always bundled with some random 128 KB upgrade board?

One of my first real job was in the government, where I typed spreadsheets into Lotus 123 on the first IBM PC I've ever seen (not an XT either). ScrollLock did something useful there! Also, were they the first one to use F1 as the help key? I used their help more than their manuals. (Oh yeah, 8-inch high 3-ring binder manuals in hard cases. Thanks IBM.)

[caesarbear]

My dad had a clone. 8088 with Hercules Graphics and an amber monitor. I was hogging it so much he bought me a C64.

[mkozlows]

Everyone remembers himem, qemm and emm. Nobody remembers Sidekick

TSRs were for people who used word processors. No gamer could ever hope to run anything if they had those sucking down conventional RAM.