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IBM PC 20 years old this August

16-08-2001 : 21:16:50

PC the 'I Claudius' of the industry

HOW WE LAUGHED back in 1981 when IBM launched the clunkiest micro around. But we were soon laughing on the other side of our faces and some of, sniff, still are.

The PC is twenty years old on August 12th this year and the bloody thing still doesn't work properly. And the basic design and the software infrastructure is still so useless even now that the simplest things you do, as The Who sang, are so complicated.

How lucky we are that when Intel re-launches its Itanic next week, the foresight of one of the firms that benefited from Big Blue's early 80 wackiness means we can run DOS boxes in 64-bit environments and use all our old software. (cough).

The IBM PC gor bless it had the fantastic effect of making many companies household names and brands, while just involving Big Blue itself in endless expense, hassle and ultimately misery.

Intel's Gordon "Moore's Law" Moore, for instance, was telling INTC shareholders in 1981 how the fortunes of the firm were fading. Microsoft was some twopenny halfpenny outfit.

Michael Dell was probably still at school or something and it would be some years before the Dell Corp, Compaq, and the rest, made their fortunes out of IBM's bastard child.

The IBM PC was very successful because back in those days, a corporation could "do no wrong" if it bought from Big Blue. Also, there was a very useful application called Visicalc, originally developed for Apple and the first spreadsheet, which would revolutionise the life of bean counters everywhere. You can download that now for nothing - see the links below.

We wouldn't see Lotus with its 1-2-3, Ashton Tate's dBase, (one of which was a parrot, we can't remember which), or Philippe Kahn's Borland for quite some time.

There was an early version of Windows which came on one floppy disk, but the first PC had a cassette interface for its IO so it just had to make do with that. GEM (see below), was just a twinkle in Digital Research's eye. (DR nearly got the contract Gates blagged from Big Blue. How history might have been different if that had happened.)

And here we are twenty years on and the stinking thing still doesn't work properly and the usual suspects like INTC and Microsoft are still advising the not-so-young machine on the best way to go.

Ah well, the x86 architecture will probably outlive us all...