Review of IBM's Original Personal Computer

illiteratehack was one of several readers to point out that today is the 30th anniversary of the introduction of IBM's first popular PC, writing, "V3 managed to dig up the original review of IBM's Personal Computer Model 5150, the machine that popularized personal computing. There are some great comments; the article's author wasn't sure if IBM would sell the PC outside the US, and he mentions the inclusion of a 'very high quality 11.5-inch' display. The article also shows that while the PC may have changed a lot on the inside, the way it was reviewed hasn't changed much in 30 years." Other readers sent in reflections on 30 years of the PC by various tech icons and a speculative look at what the computing industry would have looked like without IBM.

Comments

Scroll Lock!

[Sebastopol]

FTA:

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

30 years ago... as useless then as it is now.

Re:Scroll Lock!

[conares]

From Wikipedia:

The Scroll Lock key was meant to lock all scrolling techniques, and is a remnant from the original IBM PC keyboard, though it is not used by most modern-day software. In the original design, Scroll Lock was intended to modify the behavior of the arrow keys. When the Scroll Lock mode was on, the arrow keys would scroll the contents of a text window instead of moving the cursor. In this usage, Scroll Lock is a toggling lock key like Num Lock or Caps Lock, which have a state that persists after the key is released.

While we're reminiscing about ancient technology:

[kheldan]

My first PC was built on an XT clone motherboard. Being an electronics tech and having built the S100 bus-based computer I'd been using for years, I decided to borrow a desoldering station from work over a weekend, and desoldered every chip on the motherboard so I could install sockets for all the chips against the eventual need for troubleshooting and repair. I never did have to replace a single chip on that board the entire time I used the thing.

Re:And the winner is

[wsxyz]

Considering the 20 bit addresses in the 8088, I find it hard to get too worked up over the "brain damaged" 640KB limit on the original PC.
As for the 286 and 386 machines, they were limited by DOS, not by the hardware. You were only limited because you chose to run DOS.

Wired Magazine's Deja-Review of the IBM 5150

[Anonymous Coward]

Written by someone who was born the year the computer came out.

Hands-On With the IBM 5150, Thirty Years Later

Civilization

[XanC]

I remember in the original Civilization, if you had Scroll Lock on, the arrow keys would show you around the map rather than moving the active unit.

Re:Personal Computing

[xero314]

I tend to think that the Apple II had a hand in popularizing personal computing

You can think that, but the reality is that the personal computing revolution did not begin until the arrival of the commodore 64.

Did anyone find Cmdr Taco's review?

[UnknowingFool]

I distinctly remember it like this:

Less space than a Cray. CGA at best. Lame.

What Might Have Been...

[wernst]

As a die-hard Apple II user (still have my original //e and a spiffy Ethernet-equipped, Compact-Flash-card-as-a-hard-drive, maxed out IIGS), I've often pondered what might have been but for a few twists of computing fate.

With just between 16KB to 256KB or RAM, a pair of 140KB floppy drives, an 80-column green-screen or RGB color display, 5 card slots, and an 8-bit CPU bus with a CPU running at far less than 10 MHz, the IBM 5150 isn't that different than a contemporary Apple //e (typically with 128KB of RAM, a pair of 140KB floppies, a green screen or RGB display, 7 card slots, and a more efficient 1MHz CPU), and it wasn't obviously superior at the time. Both had similar expansion abilities (serial, parallel, game, modems, primitive hard drives in time), yet industry chose the PC to build upon because it was legally simpler.

What might have been if Apple allowed industry to clone and build upon the Apple II architecture, I wonder? Would we have had Compaq building luggable Apple II's with 16-bit CPUs and expanded memory early on? Might we have eventually had Apple IIs with 16-bit ISA slots, then VLB slots, then PCI slots, then AGP slots, and now PCI Express? Might we today have thoroughly modern computers with slick Windows-like GUIs, but if you did a Control-Reset or booted off of a USB-connected legacy Disk ][ you could still enter an AppleSoft BASIC program equivalent to booting off of an MSDOS boot floppy and doing a "dir?" Might our keyboards still have Open-Apple and Solid-Apple keys instead of Alt and Windows?

Now don't get me wrong, I love my PCs today and earn my livelihood with them, but as a former Beagle Bros employee, I sometimes can't help but wonder what might have been...

It was the shakeout, mediocrity won

[shoor]

If you can find an old computer magazine from the late 70s (BYTE, Dr Dobbs, Creative Computing, etc) you'll see ads for all kinds of different systems. It was like the early days of the automobile industry when there were many manufacturers that are all but forgotten now. Too many for it to last; there had to be what marketing people call a 'shakeout'. When IBM announced the PC, it legitimized these home computers in the minds of a lot of people who liked the idea of having a computer in their home with the 3 letters IBM on it.

But they were expensive and soon people were buying the cheaper clones. As I understand it, IBM was still mostly interested in their Mainframe business. They left the PC's architecture 'open', which allowed the cheap clones to be made. This was a decision that had important consequences I think. If IBM had suppressed the clones, what would have happened? Perhaps Apple would have become top dog in the home PC market, or perhaps some other company. Would there have ever been any 'open' architecture at all? The openness was spoiled by Microsoft cutting deals with the hardware manufacturers of those clones so that no other software had much of a chance. My feelings about Microsoft should be clear from my sig.

My big disappointment was that IBM chose to use the Intel 8086 chip. The Zilog Z8000 and Motorola 68000 were much more advanced, and I thought it was a pity that they became niche architectures by comparison. I realize IBM wasn't interested in creating something 'insanely great'. Mediocrity, or even downright inferiority prevailed. There were sound business reasons for IBM's decision at the time, but that doesn't mean I have to like the result.