The IBM PC, Part 1: Arrival – Creatures of Thought
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In the early 1980s, the personal computer market was a raucous bazaar, teeming with variety. Each distinct type of personal computer—from Atari, Radio Shack, Apple, Commodore, Texas Instruments, and many more—had its own sub-culture of clubs and magazines, full of partisans ready to tout the superiority of their chosen machines.[1]
Though a substantial bloc of smaller manufactures such as North Star and Vector Graphic all supported an Altair-compatible hardware standard (8080-compatible processor and S-100 bus) and Gary Kildall’s CP/M operating system, they were far from a monopoly share. Standards in graphics, sound, and peripheral connections varied even more widely. Most microcomputers used processors compatible with Intel’s 8080 or MOS Technology’s 6502, but the BASIC programming language was the only near-universal lingua franca, often pre-installed in read-only-memory (ROM) chips on the computer and usually supplied by Microsoft.
Table of Contents from The Microcomputer Handbook: A Buyer’s Guide (1982, edited by Dick Olney). Most of the listed computers are mutually incompatible (i.e. software written for one could not run on another).
Over the course of the 1980s, the IBM PC and its successors paved over all of that, leaving behind a near-uniform cookie-cutter subdivision of compatible computers. By the end of the decade only fragmentary remains attested to the lost world that preceded it: the antiquated Apple IIs still populating school computer labs; the strange boxes at the electronics store labeled “Amiga” and “Atari ST” (the last gasps of dying giants); the Macintoshes found in the offices of graphic designers, writers, publishers, and other members of the cultural avant garde.
The full story of how that unfolded will have to wait for another volume. For now, we will see how it began, with the launch of the IBM Personal Computer in 1981. Ironically, the ecosystem was closed by openness.
Project Chess
Ever since Thomas Waston, Junior launched International Business Machines (IBM) into the electronic computing market in the 1950s, the company had become nearly synonymous with the idea of the computer. Though many of their offerings were technically impressive, especially the breakthrough System/360 line launched in 1965, their success rested mainly on the comprehensiveness of their product line and their unmatched sales and service departments. Though not quite so dominant as it had been in prior decades, the IBM of 1980, with 40% of the global computer market, was still a powerhouse—the popular press routinely called it a “colossus.” To other computer makers, it was simply “the environment”; to be in the business was to swim in IBM’s sea.[2]
IBM’s greatest strength lay in large, mainframe computers. It could not dominate everywhere along the ever-expanding digital frontier, swarming with upstarts staking out new territories for minicomputers, software, dedicated word processing systems, and more. Each market segment had its own leading companies—smaller than IBM individually, but collectively a grave threat to its position as the center of gravity of the computer business. When it came to the very small computers that were selling in the hundreds of thousands by 1980 and projected to continue growing at an astonishing 40% per year, IBM had nothing at all to show for itself.[3]
IBM leadership had known since the early 1970s that the plummeting cost of electronics would make it practical to dedicate an entire computer to a single user. The problem was translating that knowledge into a product that would reach a mass audience. In 1973, IBM engineer Paul Friedel launched a single-user computer project that became the IBM 5100, a fifty-pound, all-in-one computer and terminal for scientists and engineers. In 1983, its creator tried to claim the 5100 as the “missing link” in personal computer history, but with a starting price of $9,000, it hardly belongs in the same forest as the Altair, let alone in its family tree.[4]
The 5100 did not have a microprocessor (which most computer engineers in 1973 still considered far too feeble an instrument to power a real computer). It ran on a multi-chip processor developed out of the IBM office in Boca Raton, Florida, about an hour north of Miami, which housed IBM’s Entry Level Systems Division. As the personal computer rose and rose in the second half of the 1970s, it became obvious in Boca Raton (and even in the airy heights of IBM headquarters in Armonk, New York) that to maintain its reputation as a leader in the world of computing, IBM had to respond. In 1978, the Florida office started work on the System 23/Datamaster, a true microcomputer based on the 8-bit Intel 8085 (a variant of the popular 8080). But two years into that project, it remained mired in development, weighed down by a succession of changes mandated by leadership to align the product with other parts of the...