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IBM Did Not Invent the Personal Computer
theodp writes "As IBM gives itself a self-congratulatory pat on the back as it celebrates its 100th anniversary, Robert X. Cringely wants to set the record straight: 'IBM didn't invent the personal computer', writes Cringely, 'but they don't know that.' Claiming to have done so, he adds, soils the legacy of Ed Roberts and pisses off all real geeks in the process. Throwing Big Blue a bone, Cringely is willing to give IBM credit for 'having helped automate the Third Reich'."
I know that not every comparison involving the Nazis is invalid, but does this strike anyone else as being more than a bit reductio ad Hitlerum?
The truth about lulz : Edwin Black, an author holed up in his basement, spending years and years researching the details for a book, reading thousands of documents and talking with hundreds of people, will achieve far more lulz, in the long run, than hacking a website.
Black's book came out circa 2001. That is 10 years ago, and people still talk about it. And we still wait for IBM to open their archives.
Hmm, I sold personal computers for around 5 years before IBM rolled their first PC out, so I guess all the people that bought them will have to look back in embarrassment now that its been revealed that those really werent either personal or computers. Imsai, Altair, Poly, Xitan, Alpha Micro...all came long before IBM rolled anything out the door. Plus we thought the IBM PC was lousy. It had a weird keyboard layout and it was slow. Real expensive compared to other alternatives of the day. You could get a much faster cpu with more memory and a larger capacity floppy drive for half the price.
It's not like he invented the single-board self-bootstrapping non-teletype microcomputer...
It seems to me that it's pretty clear that the speaker in the video is saying that that IBM invented the Personal Computer (upper case), not the personal computer, lower case. When you watch the video, the screen is showing the case where it says "IBM Personal Computer". And I think that's worth talking about, since the majority of toeday's personal computers (both windows & mac) can trace its roots back to this architecture.
I wouldn't call the Apple II exactly "obscure". And Apple was marketing using the term "Personal Computer" for at least a few years before the IBM PC came out.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
Apple was using the term "Personal Computer" from the advent of the Apple ][ in 1977. IBM's trademark was the "IBM PC" -- remember the Charlie Chaplin adverts? So, no, sorry, IBM can't even claim that.
IBM put the first real personal computer on the market. Yes, prior to that I could have gone to the electronic store and bought the parts.
The only people who call this a personal computer are idiot geeks who will go to any stupid pedantry and verbal trick to 'be right' and 'know more'.
If the altair counts, then you must consider the Kenbak-1. So I win the internet.
From wikipedia : "The original line of PCs were part of an IBM strategy to get into the small personal computer market then dominated by the Commodore PET, Atari 8-bit family, Apple II, Tandy Corporation's TRS-80s, and various CP/M machines.[2]"
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
S-110 Bus systems
Radio Shack TRS-80.
Apple I
Commodore-64
Atari-800
TI 99/4
These were all the first personal computers. IBM had nothing to do with any of it.
IBM's only claim to fame is that their hardware specs allowed others to make similar systems.. so the "IBM PC" became manufacturable by many companies... and as a result... it beat out the proprietary hardware guys.
IBM has invented many things, but the personal computer is nothing they invented.
E
bullshit, you must be young. My friends and I had personal computers in the 70s, all of different brands.
You must have a small refrigerator. The early PDPs were huge, but we had the PDP8E well before the PC came along and it wasn't really much bigger than a full-sized tower PC. (I'm qualified to repair them, although I'm a bit rusty...)
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Just like Columbus did not actually discover America, IBM did not invent the personal computer. However, just like Columbus for all intents and purposes put America on the map, IBM did deliver the PC to the world in a way that no other did (or could) at the time.
Nobody "invented" the personal computer. Taking an existing product and making it cheaper/faster/smaller/cooler is not "inventing" anything, it is merely developing a better product.
Apple did not "invent" the smartphone, Toyota did not "invent" the hybrid, and Tivo did not "invent" recording video on hard disks either.
None of those were IBM Clones or compatible with them.
That's the funniest thing I've read all day. :)
The IBM was keyboard perfection:
Byte magazine in the fall of 1981 went so far as to state that the keyboard was 50% of the reason to buy an IBM PC.
IBM Personal Computer
The original keyboard for the IBM PC was a pure piece of garbage. As a matter of fact, one of the early accessories that many PC buyers purchased was a keyboard from 3rd party developers, where important keys like the "enter key" was enlarged, along with the shift keys and a spacebar that actually felt right.
Re-read that article again, to realize how many people hated the thing. I hated it and told my professors at the time.... where they cringed in disbelief that IBM could produce such a piece of crap. One of the regular features in Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Mannor column was a review of a new keyboards to replace that piece of junk.
As if to add insult to injury, the PCjr decided to downgrade even this horrible keyboard that IBM made with something even worse. It was so awful that the CEO of IBM decided to apologize and sent a new keyboard to every customer of that computer which had registered with a warranty card. Surprisingly, this "replacement" keyboard for the PCjr was even superior to that horrible IBM PC keyboard.
I'm surprised that no one (not even IBM) has mentioned the IBM 5100
By no means is it the first Personal Computer, but it is IBM's first PC. and its arguably the first portable computer as well.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
It has the all the main personal computing features we associate with pre-Macintosh/Lisa systems, like a keyboard, CRT, local storage and user programmability. It probably predates the systems you sold by a year or two.
http://oldcomputers.net/ibm5100.html
IBM *did* invent a few other things:
Magnetic Hard Drive
Reduced Operating Instruction Set architecture
Transistorized DRAM
Relational databases
Virtual machine operating systems
DES encryption
Scanning tunneling microscope
To name a tiny fraction. So, they do have some bragging rights.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
No, he had "taken all the coursework". The difference between "taken all the coursework" and "finished your dissertation" can be YEARS. He did what a lot of people who take the course but don't do a dissertation did - he accepted a masters and left. Unfortunately he then decided to lie about it...
"Just"? You make that sound trivial, when it certainly was not.
Having been there, I can attest to the fact that IBM's PC did indeed legitimize the personal computer for not only businesses, but later for home users who, having used IBM PCs at work, wanted a familiar computer at home as well.
Back then, the mantra in business was "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", and that "magical pixie dust" settled onto the IBM PC as well... and later, with the advent of Compaq, and its "clean room" reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS, opened the door for all of the IBM PC compatible clones that came later, with BIOS' made by AMI, Phoenix and Award, and together they not only legitimized the PC market for business, but standardized it and the home personal computer market as well, while driving down prices as third-party manufacturers created computers based around them.
Hell, I was running a home LAN with IBM XT and AT clones, some booting from diskette [1], with an AT clone server running NetWare v2.0a (with a Seagate ST-4096 80MB MFM HD [2]), using ARCNET[3], back in 1988. Being able to centralized my programs, data, and share a printer was a HUGE thing for me, and for my customers as well.
Later, I upgraded my server to an 80386 clone, running NetWare v3, but still kept the 80 MB HD, and it was rock-solid, and the most reliable server I've ever had at home.
Now, you could say that it was all crude, and certainly it was, by today's standards... but I installed hundreds of LANs for small/medium-sized businesses back then, and the benefit they all gained was very real.
NONE of the latter would have been possible without IBM's PC: It not only standardized the hardware and bus, but standardized the client OS as well, which resulted in an explosion of development of not only business applications, but games, and software in general as well.
So, yeah, IBM didn't invent the "PC", and there's more than a little historical revisionism going on... but, to dismiss their effect on personal computing as "just" making it mainstream for business does them disservice as well.
Regards,
dj
[1] Hard drives were very expensive back then, so it was cheaper to use one large, expensive HD in a file server, and boot the workstations from diskette... and keep a box of backup boot diskettes on hand, just in case *grin*
[2] Seagate's ST-4096 was a state-of-the-art HD then: With 28ms average access speeds, capable of running at 1 to 1 interleave, it was blisteringly fast, and very reliable. Not to mention the fact that 80MB was "Huge tracts of storage"... when I installed one a customer, long before I could afford one myself, I asked him "So, what are you going to do with so much storage?" His answer? "Anything I want" *grin*.
[3] We used ARCNET for our customers, because the NICs were FAR less expensive than Ethernet NICs. We used SMC's NICs, until Thomas-Conrad came along, and beat them not only in price, but performance - T-C's ARCNET NICs used less upper memory in enhanced mode (4K vs. 16K or 32K as I recall), and their drivers were a LOT more efficient/faster.. later, they sold a "Universal Turbo" ARCNET NIC driver that worked with any ARCNET NIC, but made their NICs a LOT faster, and that was HUGE, too, from a management perspective: We only had to use one driver, regardless of NIC manufacturer.
Back in the pre-Ethernet switch days, ARCNET also performed a lot better under load than Ethernet with the same node count per network segment, despite "only" running at 2.5Mbps vs. Ethernet's theoretical 10Mbps...and it scaled deterministically as well. In addition, ARCNET over RG-62/U coax could be run 3000 feet, active port to active port, which helped minimize the number of active hubs needed, and offered FAR more flexibility in the real world.
[4] This footnote has no referral - but I suppose that this is where I should say "You damn kids get off my lawn!" *grin*
Nostalgically,
dj
Was a student when they were just gaining a foothold. I remember one grizzly bastard prof talking about how this PC + the just released Lotus 123 was going to put the IS group in its place.
At the time, IS departments ruled the roost, and anyone that wanted a customized view of their own data either waited an eternity for them to do a 5 minute RPG job, or had to have cum running out of their nose to get it when they needed it.
The PC changed all of that - suddenly IS lost its gatekeeper status on the data; and other than a few viruses and break-ins; we've seldom looked back.
Alas, now the cloud (new mainframe) will give the IS (now IT) group back its previous status. To paraphrase Henry Spencer:
Those that don't remember the past will reinvent it, badly.
I looked at Radio Shack, Apple, Commodore, and some S100 stuff at several local computers stores. Apple II required constant hacking and had severe glitches unless lots of extra money was spent on a CP/M card -- unless all you wanted to do was play games. CP/M-S100 boxes were business- and hacker-only. Commodore PET had a calculator-button keyboard and a shape only Wonder Woman could love (IRA?). Radio Shack Trash-80 Model 1 came as a complete system in a box, for a reasonable price (about 1/2 Apple's), with manuals written in Real English, and just worked (until I started expanding it and had to disassemble every 6 months for cleaning the non-gold-plated card edges). Had many home and business apps, some of which came with source code. Used it for over 10 years, until for work compatibility reasons I finally had to get a clone 386 with Windoze 3.1 (a step down in usability).
I.E. einstein's letter to roosevelt.
IBM's involvement with various questionable rulers in the 20s and 30s was not done as an act of warfare, it was done for pure profit motive.
I completely disagree. The model F IBM-XT keyboard was one of the best keyboards I've had the pleasure to use, the tactile feeling is something I'll never forget. In fact, when I ditched the XT (bad move, it'd now be worth a bit as a collectible) I kept the keyboard and I still have it to this day. I took it into work (a school) a year or so ago for a teacher to use in their lesson, showing the evolution of hardware and everyone who tried it was amazed at how good it felt. It makes modern membrane keyboards feel like typing into a pot of mushy peas. No idea what you mean about the spacebar, having just tried it again it's super - it works no matter where you press it, it's six inches long and makes a clacky noise when you use it.
The layout was, erm, "interesting" what with control being where caps lock is now and caps lock being down at the bottom right but back then the "enhanced 101 key" keyboards hadn't been invented. Even the IBM AT in 1984 shipped with a similar keyboard, the famous Model M didn't come out for a while afterwards.
Due to the lack of cursor keys I grew up using the numeric keypad as cursor control - and to this day I still use the numpad as my cursor control, that inverted-T layout is just weird.
Proud Italian Americans tend to say, that once Columbus discovered America, it stayed discovered.
But that's not a good analogy for IBM's contribution to the PC. The fact is that the PC was already there, and had a decent market, and was starting to make dramatic inroads into small and medium businesses thanks to the PC's first killer-app VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet program). This program first ran on the AppleII and propelled Apple from a small (actually fairly dominant) enthusiast company to Silicon Valley's latest wunderkind. This was well before IBM got into the marketplace. But everyone knew they would, considering the surge, and the rapidly expanding business market. The thing was that at the time, IBM's entry was met with quite a bit of disappointment. We were all expecting great things, but that was decidedly not what the 1st IBM PC was. A run of the mill CPU married to an also-ran OS. Not a step forward so much as a step sideways. Also a significant departure was that none of this stuff was actually developed by IBM, but by Intel, and an unknown snot-nosed kid with a bad haircut, who's mom was on IBM's board at the time. And yet, it was destined to become a huge thing. The technology decision makers in business were certainly no more savvy then than they are now. Why did it take off? "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was what was often said.
So, as it turns out, the singular thing that IBM contributed to the PC was its logo.
You're mistaken. The IBM PC and the IBM PC XT used the same keyboard. It's known as a model F keyboard.
Here's a picture of the original 5150 PC keyboard, from Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_5150_Keyboard.jpg
Here's the picture of my 5160 PC keyboard, which is exactly the same:
http://i52.tinypic.com/24cf8ft.jpg
For further proof, look here:
http://www.clickykeyboards.com/index.cfm/fa/items.main/parentcat/11066/subcatid/0/id/350492
That's a US layout rather than the UK layour I have, but it's the same basic model. The IBM PC and PC XT had the same keyboards. It was only the PC AT of 1984 that saw a change (and the PCjr).
This is correct. The original PC/XT was good, the AT keyboard even better. The chicklet PCjr keyboard was junk.
I can't imagine any college at that time teaching programming on PC-DOS 1.0. Don't believe it.
Having owned both an Apple //+ and an IBM PC-1 I feel I must comment on this post. The Apple did not feel flimsy. The Commodore 64 felt flimsy. Amusingly, many C64s are still working after obscene quantities of abuse. There's a lot of computer in that box, too; a friend of mine added an ISA slot to one and planted a mono text card in it for use in a cafe terminal, for example. IIRC he added an XT keyboard interface as well. Maybe that was a 128, I don't recall at this late date. The Apple had a fantastic case that no computer before or since has equaled save possibly the Macintosh IIci. It holds up amazingly well, its function is served admirably by its form, and it is utterly apprehensible as such things go. And of course, I would say the same about the C64, but with the understanding that it is so much less machine in so many ways. If the Apple had come equipped with some kind of advanced music synthesis (as did the C64) I wouldn't even be using it for comparison today.
Nobody I knew had a TRS-80. I used to go play Thexder on it at Radio Shack in the mall. It looked and felt even more flimsy than the C64. I didn't even have a 64, I had a 16. Oh, the agony.
The IBM PC was expensive; luckily I didn't pay for it. I got mine for free well after its heyday, after the demise of my first Amiga 500. I'm pretty sure it was all my fault. Actually, I think I only killed the keyboard interface or something, but it's all hazy now. For additional comparison, the Amiga 500 felt pretty sturdy but looked like garbage, however cool I thought it looked at the time. I think only the towers looked good after the A1000 until the A4000, but maybe that's just me. Consider that I was a pretty diehard Amiga wingnut at the time, too. I've got a 1200, I've had a 3000, 2000, 2500 (came that way, that is.)
Now, when you suggest that the display of the IBM PC was "crisp", I have to take exception. I had that display, and it was muddy as hell just like the IBM terminals of the day. It did, however, have more characters than the Apple. I do have to agree with you about the keyboard, although I'm not sure any keyboard ever needed to be quite so loud.
The Apple was more affordable than the IBM, not least because you could output to your television. Indeed, this trend carried all the way through the Amiga computers; a decent monitor that would do what the Amiga's video output would do was expensive at the time. Remember what the original NEC Multisync cost? Yowza. I had a CGA display hooked up to my Amiga for a while; you can imagine how disappointing that was. I puttered around with CGA and EGA on my PCs for quite some time because I couldn't afford a monitor. My first VGA monitor was a 12" or so monochrome 640x480 unit... it hurts my eyes just to think about it.
The Apple 2 family was the first credible personal computer that gained widespread popularity in the USA. The IBM PC's primary contribution was that it was blown open and endlessly cloned. Having multiple manufacturers making compatible machines is what brought us the computing landscape we know today. It could have happened to anyone, but IBM had the credibility to make people want to copy them. Given that I was using the PC-1 many years after its debut and still getting stuff done (I had Lotus and Wordstar... and a 30 MB full-height Quantum MFM disk in an external case) I have nothing against the PC. Clearly IBM created a winner. It was hilarious to see them flail with the PS/2s.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
IBM was the first computer manufacturer that brought all the elements together,
Back in reality, IBM was the computer manufacturer with a monopolistic track record that ignored PCs for years, then panicked and brought-out a "me too" system running a clone of the already-industry-standard CP/M with a kludgey not-quite-true 16-bit processor. They then used their industry muscle to take over the corporate microcomputing market (and extinguish the previous CP/M practice of designing software to be easily patched to run on diverse systems) - then got their underpants pulled up over their heads when someone found a legal way of cloning their proprietary firmware (without which, however many bloody circuit diagrams they published, nobody else could have made a software-compatible PC).
Consequently, we got stuck with CP/M functionality and paged RAM for a decade, just when CP/M was reaching its sell-by date and proper 32-bit processors were becoming available.
That's the way I remember it, anyway - and unlike your version, my version doesn't require airbrushing CP/M systems, the S-100 bus, RS232, Shugart (disc interface), Centronics (printer interface) and all the other de-facto, pre-IBM standards out of history.
Hint: one reason why some cheaper systems like the Trash 80 and Vic had proprietary connectors is that they were a fraction of the price of an IBM PC and adding (e.g.) a floppy disc interface, or even a proper "standard" expansion bus costs money. Floppy drive connectors, for example, were perfectly standard by the early 80s, but not much good unless your computer had a disc controller.
but the "PC compatible" architecture's primary competitor on the desktop was, just about 14 years ago, still rolling-out computers that had an oddball monitor connector, used proprietary expansion cards, ran a proprietary OS, and had proprietary connectors for almost all their peripherals.
...would that be the proprietary "localtalk" connectors that implemented low-cost local area networking and printer sharing years before Ethernet became affordable? Or the monitor connectors that ensured that, whatever monitor you used, on-screen, 1 pixel = 1 point when doing DTP work? Or the desktop bus system that allowed keyboards, mice, tablets etc. to be daisy-chained rather than each having to have a lead going back to the computer? Or is "SCSI" the non-standard disc interface you're talking about? Standardisation is fine provided you've finished innovating.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.