How the IBM PC Changed the World

Sabah Arif writes "On August 12, 1981, IBM released the IBM PC 5150. In less than two years, IBM had created a computer that would not only change IBM, but the entire world, mostly because it did not follow IBM tradition. It used an outside microprocessor (instead of the nascent IBM 801), operating system and software. Low End Mac recounts the birth of the IBM PC 5150."

Comments

The Next Big Thing

[ian_mackereth]

I reckon it was the Turbo button that was the best part of early PCs.

These days, no turbo button, so I'm stuck at a crawling 3GHz...

Re:The Next Big Thing

[Squarewav]

I wish there was a modern version of the "Turbo" button

for thoes that don't know.. so many games and programs were made for the 8086/8088 that when they started upping the clockspeed many games ran too fast so they implimented the turbo button so that you could slow down the cpu to make old games and such useable

would be nice now to beable to push a button and have games from around 1995~ or so that I have lieing around playable again.. but alas that would be an interesting trick sence you'd have to impliment 3dfx voodoo 1, soundblaster and true dos in software/hardware

Re:The Next Big Thing

[Snover]

And imagine that, they've done it. (Well, except for the Voodoo. But I bet that would happen eventually.)

Re:The Next Big Thing

[Valacosa]

I wish there was a modern version of the "Turbo" button

So do I. I wonder how many FPS I'd get in Unreal Tournament 2K4 if I suddenly dropped my CPU* down to 8 MHz mid-game. My guess: 0.0037. Hey, we could start expressing Frames Per Second in scientific notation!

* Before some humourless nerd points this out, yes, I know a good chunk of the graphics in modern games is generated by a dedicated GPU. Lets pretend the turbo button affects the video card too, okay? It's a personal fantasy of mine.

Re:The Next Big Thing

[pimpimpim]

Hmmm, let me think, reintroducing something from the 80's as if it was your own innovation..... Maybe you should just wait for the next WWDC! Except that it won't be called 'turbo' anymore (that is really too 80's), but more something like "Engage". And it won't be an actual button, but more some sort of fancy transparent widget.

CPM

[Tablizer]

I don't know why it is considered so great historically. CPM machines had spreadsheets and dBASE and word-processors and were doing quite well. The IBM PC stole that market and killed CPM because of the brand name. CPM would have been the base framework of the machines we use today had it not been for the IBM PC. In fact, the PC barrowed CPM-machine hardware in many cases.

Re:CPM

[Waffle Iron]

CP/M was one of the OSes that IBM offered on the PC. So the PC itself didn't kill CP/M, rather it was probably Microsoft's much lower pricepoint for PC-DOS, along with all the customers who didn't feel that CP/M offered enough additional value to justify the extra cost.

Re:CPM

[70Bang]

Windows killed OS/2.[1]

Microsoft & IBM had a partnership underway. When it came to renewal & examination of what stood where, Microsoft gracefully bowed out. That left Windows and OS/2 on the market [as separate products]. I don't have dates for other releases, but I know Windows 3.1 was in the March<->May '92 timeframe and remember working on an OS/2 book (power users) in the late '92 or '93 timeframe. For some time, software packages which ran on one ran on the other. This was still a DOS environment as you couldn't boot Windows and there were several flavors of DOS.

Several Microsoft documents detailing meeting minutes indicated a discussion about making it such Windows wouldn't run upon anything but MS-DOS. The resolution was, "Only if it will absolutely, positively runs on MS-DOS [no matter what, no question whatsoever]; if it runs on something else, that's fine...it's better to err by running on too much than too little." The goal was to make it WOM[2]people would call and the response would be, "I'm sorry, Windows only runs on MS-DOS. I can put you in touch with the Sales[3] department so you can purchase a copy."

There are a few packages which are still OS/2-only, although they might be migrating if not having done so recently. The missus works at a large hospital and Pyxis (automated med dispenser, it tracks userid, password, station, date|time, medication, doseage, etc. Basically, it a data collection system where you enter the necessary info and a drawer with the meds opens up for you to remove the meds. If the hospital has moved from OS/2, it's been less than a year and was extremely painful. They've had plenty of problems anyway, so I don't remember which one of the agonizing pains brought home would have been the migration. (fortunately, they're better than SMS on the mainframe (from days of yore). I so hated trying to protect the machines the systems programmers|technical support were responsible for and SMS demanded God privileges in order to do their work, walking in like stormtroopers. That's when we found out they were all OJT.[4]

Someone mentioned CP/M and the turbo button. With the commercials today, one would expect an [Easy] button instead - slow things down & make them intolerably slow. I'm guessing any version of Windows would be like pushing the [Easy] button. Perhaps, push the [Easy] button and a list of Windows partitions (in order of slowness) would pop up and ask you which one you want to run. ;)
________________________________
[1] The saying about OS/2 was DB/2, OS/2, PS/2: Half of a database running on half an operating system running on half of a PC.
[2] WOM = Write-Only Memory. Infinite storage capacity, but if you try to read...out comes the smoke and they call support. "Smoke came out of the cabinet? Are you certain? Did you try to read from it? Oh, I'm sorry. It's read-only. You can store as much as you want, but you cannot retrieve it. During a trip to an ACM conference in college '84, several of us who had a few too many glasses of gin (I hate vermouth) and bloody maries were working out the details to create a glossy brochure to send to the profs.
[3] Remember, Microsoft's strengths are Marketing, PR, and Sales; aka Huey, Dewey and Louie. I don't think people calling would understand if someone said, "I'll put you in touch with Donald Duck's nephew, Louie Duck." ;)
[4] On the Job Training. "We'll hire you dirt-cheap but won't send you to any classes. That costs money. The best thing to do is send you out into the mean, harsh world and you'll figure things out with time. Providing you don't booger up the clients' systems first. This isn't a case of being hired and learn things fast. This is being hired today and sent to a client site tomorrow without a parachute or docs.

the x86

[phantomfive]

On the one hand, the x86 is a terrible design. It doesn't have enough registers, and the assembly interface is awkward (especially in the FPU). On the other hand, the openness of the architecture has freed us from the shackles of dependency on a single company for hardware (which DRM would like to lay back on us). If you don't like Intel, you can go to AMD. There are tons of board manufacturers to choose from, and all the parts need to be (more or less) interoperable.

This prevents one manufacturer from imposing their wishes on us. If Microsoft had control of their personal computer platform the way apple does, we surely would have lost the battle to DRM already. Computers would be more expensive because there wouldn't be competition from cheap manufacturers in Taiwan to drive the prices down.

The x86 may be an ugly beast, but it gives us the freedom that only openness can bring. And I will drink to that.

Re:the x86

[linguae]

There are just a few problems:

The x86 has managed to kill off every other competing processor in the desktop space and relegate them to embedded computing or history books. First Alpha, then MIPS, and finally the PowerPC. (I'm typing this on an Intel Mac). We are now back to one architecture again, which is good for compatibility, but sucks for platform diversity. Not that I'm complaining about my computer (or the latest x86 offerings in general); you can't go wrong with the 1.83GHz Core Duo. The new Xeon chips make a dream machine. Intel did a very good job with the internals of the processor, by making it RISC-like (while still maintaining the x86 instruction set) and making it perform fast and relatively cool at the same time. I also like AMD's offerings; the Athlon 64 makes 64-bit computing very affordable (with great performance). But what about 10-20 years from now? Where will the new computer architecture ideas (or, more specifically, microprocessor ideas) come from? Will we finally get beyond the x86 instruction set? (Anybody who can point me to some recent academic/industrial research in this area will make me happy).

Secondly, guess who is in the Trusted Computing Group? Intel and AMD. My Intel Mac has a TPM chip used to make sure I don't do something like purchasing a $299 Dell special desktop and installing OS X on it. Most new Core Duo laptops sold have some sort of TPM chip on them, although as of yet they have no use (unless you have a Mac). Imagine what happens when the law/**AA/Microsoft/whatever demands hardware-enforced DRM. Well, we already have the hardware on the Intel machines. AMD probably doesn't want to lose a few sales and doesn't want to look out of date, so they'll implement a TPM chip, too. Since there are no other architectures to choose from, you're stuck.

Now, hopefully this doesn't happen. I am optimistic that this won't happen. There is quite a bit of backlash of DRM (even with normal consumers; look at the Sony rootkit fiasco, for example). However, it can happen, and the architecture for hardware-enforced DRM is falling into place. It's just the software that's falling behind, as usual.

It was Compaq that opened up the clone market

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The article gave pretty short shrift to the Compaq engineers for the reverse engineering of the PC architecture.

Imagine you were Chinese and had laid bare before you the innards of some cool technology that until now was locked up tight. You'd be the first one to put down your eggroll and cat-kabob and get right to the task of extracting its secrets. That's when you'd open up the clone market. It wouldn't be the prerogative of the original company whether you created the clone or not, it's out of their hands once they decided to use an open architecture.

Compaq blazed the clone trail, not IBM.

No, Columbia Data Systems was first

[Terje Mathisen]

Just after the PC introduction (at NCC fall 1981) I told my father-in-law that we should re-implement the software used for OCR processing in his downtown office. We should select something PC-compatible since this new open architecture was bound to generate compatibles, thereby ensuring a pretty long lifetime.

After looking around the market, we bought two Columbia PCs, one desktop (with an immense, never to be filled, 10 MB hard drive) and one luggable, for the same price as a single IBM PC.

The Columbia machine came with a BIOS/HW manual that documented all the various lowlevel interfaces, including the port adresses for things like the serial port and the interrupt controller, which allowed me to write a hw interrupt driver for the incoming 9600 baud OCR data stream.

Columbia was both earlier than Compaq and more compatible, but that didn't matter, they still went under a couple of years later. The PCs lived for many years however. :-)

Terje

Thank Phoenix Technologies

[reporter]

The IBM PC exerted a tremendous impact on the entire computer industry due to the confluence of 4 important factors.

1. The IBM PC was initially sold for about $1295. That was much cheaper than any other IBM computer. Apple and Commodore had cheaper computers, but small-business owners want the IBM name on their computers. Business people tended to view Apple computers and Commodore computers as toys.

2. The computer had the IBM label on it. These days, the IBM label does not carry the same cachet that the IBM name carried in the 1980s. At that time, IBM dominated the mindshare in the computer industry. People often said, "No one was ever fired for buying an IBM computer."

3. IBM encouraged other companies to build hardware and software for the IBM PC. It literally came with a full set of manuals documenting the entire BIOS and the internal wiring among the chips of the motherboard. Compare that open approach to, say, the typical Sony laptop. The plethora of software and hardware peripherals for the IBM PC enabled it to be adapted to a wide-range of useful applications: music synthesis, video games, desktop publishing, real-time intruder monitoring, etc.

4. Phoenix Technologies cloned the BIOS, enabling an army of companies to legally build functioning clones of the IBM PC. This army of cloners then spawned an entire universe of component suppliers. This intense competition among so many cloners and suppliers drastically lowered the price of the IBM PC and its clones. In turn, the lowered prices dramatically increased sales of the personal computers. Today, you can buy a Dell laptop for $500.

As prices dropped, more people bought computers; with more people owning computers, more companies building software and hardware for the computers appeared. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Among the four factors, item #4 is probably the most important factor in amplifying the impact of the IBM PC on the entire computer industry.

You can easily see the impact of #4 by comparing (1) the size of the ecosystem of companies building hardware and software for IBM PCs (now known as Lenovo PCs) and their clones and (2) the size of the ecosystem of companies building hardware and software for 68000 Macintoshes or PowerPC Macintoshes. Still more interesting, the enormous size and supercompetitive nature of the 1st ecosystem has swallowed even Apple: the new x86 Macintoshes are essentially (in a very general sense) an IBM clone. The x86 Macintoshes use the x86 (the central component of an IBM clone) and take advantage of the super-cheap VLSI chips from which IBM clones are built.

Re:Thank Phoenix Technologies

[pimpimpim]

It's easy to see that point (4), copying the idea and standards to other hardware companies, couldn't have happened if they didn't give away all the documentation as in point (3). And, point (4) not only increased the impact of IBM on the history of PCs, but it also decreased their market share as a PC supplier enormously.

What I find interesting to speculate on, is if they would've been bigger now if they had used some sort of "trusted hardware" contract, the same as which microsoft already tries to put through for some time now: forcing suppliers to develop hardware/software only under contract, and making sure that only hardware from those suppliers will actually function on their platform (not that the hardware capacity was there to check stuff like that at the time, I guess).

Or, would they have been marginalized by the more open competition if they would've chosen that path, and their current technique to support open standards, but deliver paid service and support for companies that need reliable software/hardware, is actually the best one?

The turnaround of IBM

[iota]

What the IBM 5100 really represents, in retrospect, is the beginning of the turnaround for IBM in the minds of the public. It's difficult to think of another example of a company so large and so universally despised eventually becoming the (mostly) developer friendly company it is today.

By allowing their teams to skirt the system occasionally, we've seen truly open hardware (PowerPC) availablity, open source contributions, free training seminars for developers, etc. The 5100 was the first great example of the success that a little rule-breaking can bring to the company.

IMO, it was exactly that product and the example that it was to IBM internally that allowed IBM to do the one thing no one was entirely sure it would be able to do in the age of personal computers -- survive.

My hat's off to the improvements IBM has made in the last 25 years, and I hope that those lessons won't be forgotten over the next 25 years.

OTOH, assembler, board design was easy in X86

[Flying pig]

In the late 70s/early 80s I worked with a number of 16 bit architectures - TMS9900, 8086, 68000, F101, PDP-11. The great thing about the X86 was that it was extremely easy to use for the migrating 8-bit programmer and it was easy to teach. Not so easy for me, I began on 16 bit and then in later years had to do embedded work with 8 bit processors which I hated!

In fact all the early processors had their architectural horrors. The 9900 had an absurd system in which the bit order of IO was reverse numbered with respect to the bus and we actually got an I/O board into production before we realised this owing to the poor documentation. The 68000 constantly caught out assembly programmers because of its word alignment issues, resulting in one occasion in a programmer going near berserk and having a screaming fit in the lab, fortunately when the boss was out at a meeting. And don't talk to me about the F100/L except to say that Ferranti did not get as much pain as they deserved for creating it. Not that it would ever have become mainstream...

It's easy to be clever with hindsight, but the Power architecture came later and too late. After, as I recall, the NS32032 which, despite some performance issues, was a processor I really liked.

$1295

[Sithech]

Yes, I remember going downtown in SF to see the PC. For $1295 you got a machine with 16 K of memory, no graphics adapter, no floppy drives. You could hook it to a cassette recorder. Pretty much a clone of the bottom-end configuration of the Apple II, at about the same cost (no, Apples weren't significantly cheaper). What it had going for it was a keyboard that included lower-case and function keys . And the graphics modes of the color adapter were very impressive. Also it could be configured with an enormous 640 K of memory, which was more than the floppy drive held.

For the record, all the popular small systems of the time had third party add-ons. That's a tradition that goes back all the way to the Altair. The Apple II didn't even have an RF modulator, because a third-party deal saved some headaches for Apple. All the systems came with full documentation. Apple even gave you the source code for the whole ROM in a separate manual right in the box, along with the schematics. Cloning the BIOS happened long after the PC had established its place - and the first clones had significant compatibility problems. Clones really didn't take off until Compac beat IBM to market with a 386-based machine.

They Don't Make 'Em Like That Anymore

[Vollernurd]

Man, the hardware... Hewn from a single piece of purest iron those things were (literally?) bullet-proof. The keyboards would last for years before even one of those keys stopped working.

Of course, you couldn't lift them. But whilst machines now whirr away at insane speeds and generally work well their keyboards suck.

Er... that's it. Just got misty-eyed there for a second.

Altair & the Apple I

[VValdo]

Funny you should mention it. I was just reading this fascinating account by Steve Wozniak about how he invented the Apple I (semi-technical), and he talks a bit about the Altair.

Anyone have a "Woz" //gs?

W

Re:The article misses important details. . .

[ewhac]

According to many sources, including former Microsoft employees, the bugs IBM took out were forced to remain in Microsoft's version of the OS, MS-DOS. Microsoft took advantage of these bugs to put companies such as Digital Research, WordPerfect, Lotus and others out of business by not disclosing the bugs to its competitors.

Actually, had PC clones not emerged, Microsoft would have been relegated to the scrapheap of history as just another vendor of a BASIC interpreter. And a fairly crappy BASIC at that.

However, once the clones emerged, MS had it made. IBM was certainly not prepared to put in the engineering work to make PC-DOS run on non-IBM hardware. Microsoft, however, was willing to do that work (or at least let PC OEMs pay Microsoft to teach them how to do it themselves), and offer pack-in deals. As such, IBM PCs came bundled with PC-DOS, and every other machine came bundled with MS-DOS.

Back then, just about everyone in the engineering community knew MS-DOS was shit, and would steer anyone who would listen toward PC-DOS, or Digital Research's CP/M-86 or Concurrent CP/M. However, most end-users considered MS-DOS to be "good enough," and it was "free," and they wanted to be able to run the same software they used on the real IBM PC at work on their cheap(er) clone at home. And besides any bugs were the application's fault.

Oh, and you're also forgetting what the gold standard of PC compatibility was at the time:

Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Amazing foresight? Maybe, to some degree. But in large measure Gates fell flat on his face into a pile of amazingly good luck.

Schwab