The IBM Personal Computer

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HARDWARE Creative Computing Magazine, December 1981 Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.48.0, 2024-11-25).
[See the full post at: The IBM Personal Computer]

Total of 21 users thanked author for this post. Here are last 20 listed.

rc primak, katiedid, ClearThunder, jburk07, fisher75, LH, Cybertooth, Steve S., Patricia Grace, DaveH52, Steve, WSTinyX, htomczak, Mark, Norio, teuhasn2, infomas, DKThompson, DLivesInTexas, lmacri

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I could relate a story about how the capabilities of ROM BASIC and BASICA or advanced BASIC could be confused by students, and the dire consequences.  I was the one punished for their disobedience and error.

Mark

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Will Fastie

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Yes, I remember those days.  File names were limited to 7 characters.  The list of DOS commands was short.  My first computer was an “Eagle” brand it was a second generation 8080 processor.    My printer was a dot matrix and cost $1100.  The printer was a 9 pin rather than the normal 7 pin. There were 2–5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives.

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Will Fastie

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Great article! It’s striking that computer magazines back then were 350 pages long, and this one review took 10 pages. But reading the review shows the depth and detail that were included, much more then the snippets we read in today’s online media.

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Skyking wrote:

What does our future hold?

The iPhone 78 will be a brain implant.

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Thanks Will!  What a trip down memory lane!  I also had a life changing experience with the release of the IBM PC.  The purchase of that computer (I shared your angst over the financial outlay), sent me down a different, and ultimately better, path in life.  Thanks for sharing the article.

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Will Fastie

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What a flash back! I was working as a Static RAM Product Engineer at AMD in 1981. I was cheap, so I didn’t immediately run out to get one until one day BusinessLand was selling surplus IBM Employee Purchase system units with keyboards at a discount. (They were  not happy that I didn’t buy anything else to make it do anything other than a POST Beep.) I then got one of those inch thick computer advertising magazines and started buying compatible hardware: Half Height 320K floppy drives. Plantronics Color Plus CGA which had double the memory of the CGA and gave 4 color 640×200 support. (The only app that used it was Lotus Symphony. ) I also got a Zenith color monitor that supported composite and CGA connections. The original bootable Flight Simulator had a mode for composite color. For I/O I found a cheap “six-pack” card that did Floppy, Centronics, Serial, and extra memory. Eventually I added a Hard Drive, modem, and Epson MX-80. I had subscriptions to PC Magazine, PC Tech Journal, Byte, and PC World.  I started building systems from bare bones from then on. My latest is an i5-11600K with 64GB of memory and 2 SSDs.  I helped bring IBM PCs into AMD fab manufacturing using them as VT240 terminal emulators for our shop floor control system that ran on DEC VAX hardware. PCs were not yet on every desk and interoffice mail was still all paper and fax. I was hired by Intel in 1987 as CIM manager in the ASIC group where they were making PS/2 chip sets. Everyone had email and a PC! I was glad I made the move. I am since retired and developing software in C++ for day traders.

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Will Fastie

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Thank you, Will, for an excellent and fascinating article, and a cheerful trip down memory lane. I was but a young thing back then, selling computers and other electronics at Radio Shack during high school in the early 1970s and later in the JC Penney electronics department as I worked my way through college. I remember the day we received the Atari 800 and Texas Instruments  TI/99 home computers at JC Penney. We had to learn how to use them in order to be able to sell them effectively. Your 1981 article on the IBM PC is very well written. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

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Will Fastie

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Wow, impressive story, I remember those days.  My first home computer was an Atari 800 in the early 80’s.  While not the PC geek that you were, I did become an IBM mainframe programmer for 38 years. The Atari 800 was useful for dialing in from home and handling minor programming emergencies, when coupled with the 300 baud modem, lol.

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Will Fastie

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I was introduced to IBM “computing” in 1958 when I began a part-time job at Compton Junior College running a printer that was “programmed” with wires in a large board.

After a stretch in the army as a computer operator on a gigantic IBM system and later, a much smaller 1401 unit, I left the army and started looking for a computing job.

The jobs weren’t hard to come by then. Lots to do and few people trained to it.

The most enlightening thing for me when I sat down for my first shot at the IBM PC, was the mind blowing thought that this machine was going to be really BIG!

The first time I sat down at a store in front of an IBM PC and created a Visicalc report I said to myself, “This is the future!”

I was reading all the magazines I could get my hands on. Computing became my personal and business life until I retired.

Thanks for the article’s reprint. And, thanks to all of those working in the Magazine field. It was fun and important then, and it continues to be today!

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Steve

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Fascinating article!  It brought back memories of the “great leap” the PC initiated compared to the “personal” computers some 0f my colleagues were using. (I had become “allergic” to computers I had used in the early-to-mid sixties).  I remember the prices of the IBM PC being condemned at much too expensive, and given the prices in today’s dollars, justly so for a “home” computer!  How times have changed 😮 .

Thanks for a most enjoyable article,

Scott

 

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Will Fastie

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Amazing adventure you had back then, Will.  You had the vision for the future of computing in you.
Imagine the cost of a gigabyte of RAM, at the prices we paid for a megabyte back then.  I don’t think even Elon could afford it.
What does our future hold?

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Will Fastie

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Thanks you for that article! It brought back some old old memories.
I cut my computer teeth on a build-it-yourself Altair 8800 back in the ’70s. Programming was performed by setting the switches and then the load switch for each machine language instruction. Even a simple program took a while. The results were displayed on the front panel LEDs in binary. After struggling for months, I finally finished a routine to get it to load and save programs on a portable cassette recorder. Then I installed a ROM with CP-M – what a time saver! I could now use a keyboard, but I still used the cassette recorder. After building the interface, I eventually got a floppy disk to work. That was so much more reliable than the cassette recorder. The very first IBM PC I ever saw wasn’t until the early 80s at Lockheed, where I was working at the time. Most of the computers there were NorthStar CP-M machines, but our supervisor decided he wanted an IBM machine instead. One of my coworkers showed me his brand-new Apple with the first graphical interface I’d ever seen. See the “Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)” on Youtube. It’s been a wild ride since then!

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Steve S., Will Fastie

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I would not complain at all about more nostalgia/blast from the past articles. And, wow, I really miss print computer magazines 😭

 

Thank you for sharing!

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Will Fastie

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Patricia Grace wrote:

I really miss print computer magazines

Imagine how a former editor of one of those magazines feels!

Print magazines are difficult these days. Assuming that PC Tech Journal existed today, and that its costs were more or less equivalent, an annual paper subscription would cost $140. But advertising would be harder to come by because it’s extremely economical for companies to launch a website, and we’ve all been “trained” to look for them. So I think the cost would be $200 or more, and most would be reluctant to pay that much. Only magazines with circulations much bigger than even Byte can offer a reasonable price due to their volume.

Progress.

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Thanks for that Will, Great read!
I think my first exposure to computers was a Commodore 64 that  I stole off our store’s display after they hadn’t sold any for a couple months. I was the service manager for a 7 store stereo chain from 1983 to 1988. I had so many repairs coming in, and only me and my apprentice to do the work so I wrote a program to keep track of any units that had to be sent back to their manufacturers. If a store manager called about a repair I punched the tag # into the Commodore then went to that store’s shelves to see if it was there, if I heard the Commodore ‘Beep’ I knew I could stop looking on the shelves. Average look up time was 30 seconds. It still saved me a lot of time. In 1998 I became the ‘Network Administrator’ at a local manufacturer with an NT 3.1 Server and 13 workstations, and on and on…..
Thanks again for the flashback 🙂

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Will Fastie

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Wow. Major flashback.

My first IBM compatible was a Commodore Colt. 8088-2 CPU with RGB graphics, (connected to a 12 inch TV), 2 5.25 floppies. It also had 3 8bit ISA slots and 640KB ram. I replaced one 5.25 floppy with a 3.5 floppy. Installed a whopping 20MG hard drive, later upgraded to a 40MG hard drive. Finally installed a VGA GPU. I also installed a memory card which could be configured as extended memory or expanded memory. I used different boot floppies depending on what my needs were. Many times I would make a RAM Disk and copy the program I needed to the RAM Drive for faster access.

Miss those DOS days when an entire program was installed into ONE Directory and didn’t have files spread all over every drive in the computer. And to uninstall a program, you deleted the directory.

 

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dg1261, wavy

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Agree with you on the old single folder installs. It was so simple – if done right.

I’ve watched that idea sort of come back after these many decades: “portable” versions of programs in Windows plus “flatpaks” in Linux. What’s old becomes new again.

Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.

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dg1261

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“portable” versions of programs in Windows plus “flatpaks” in Linux.

Flatpak is not comparable to portable apps.

AppImages in Linux are portable apps not requiring installing a framework to run, and not using as many shared libraries. Flatpak is (along with Snap) a framework within which to run containers or virtualized programs, sandboxed and often with their own file systems.  Portable apps and AppImages use the OS’s native file system and do not have as much inherent sandboxing. Getting data from within Flatpak and Snap file systems to and from the Root file system is often quite challenging.

AppImage does fit the analogy with old disk-resident programs. Flatpak does not.

-- rc primak

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TechTango

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My father was a Systems Analyst who worked with COBOL on Univac and then eventually IBM systems. I went with him in spring of 1982 to a ComputerLand store to purchase an IBM PC. I seem to recall that we went into the store on a Saturday wearing jeans and the salesmen were wearing suits. I remember them all looking at us when we came in and probably 5 minutes passed before one of them approached us. My father said he wanted an IBM PC with 64K, diskette drive, printer, DOS and a monitor. After looking at the default monitor and asking for a different color option, he was shown a monitor with an orange phosphor, which my father was able to see better because he was legally blind. I believe the total cost was between $5,500 and $6,000. I don’t remember how he paid for it. As Will attested in his review, it was a solid system. And the documentation IBM provided in their early PC years was first rate. The first of many PCs he owned while he was alive.

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wavy

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I was in grad school in Monterey CA and we had a bunch of 8080/Z80-based PCs running CP/M also an Intel development system with PL/M (Kildall had been our OS prof).  When Intel announced the 8086/8088 that seemed like the hot ticked for “personal” computing.

 

At the PC launch IBM would only sell them through certain of its retail outlets.  I was in Illinois for business and had to drive into downtown Chicago in order to actually buy one.  Got a pretty basic one but with “full” 64k memory and the combo MDA/Printer add-in card.  That was my first 5.25″ floppy; in school it was all 8″.  PC-DOS 1.0 but IBM soon upgraded to 1.1.  IIRC it increased floppy capacity from 140k to 160k (so you could flip the floppy over to get 320 on it).

 

Fortunately the computer came with manuals with full board schematics and BIOS listing; soon the aftermarket was turning out ISA cards so I got a RAM card where I could plug 640k of RAM, and a CGA graphics card (but still a monochrome monitor, though I did upgrade the IBM one to a Princeton).  Didn’t get color until EGA spec came out.

 

I swapped in an NEC V-20 CPU that was pin compatible.  Then desoldered the clock chip and installed a new socketed clock that was connected to a hardware switch that I could switch on for “turbo” 7MHz mode.

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Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I was using a Kaypro II that I traded in for a Kaypro 10. I recall telling friends that one could NEVER fill that hard drive. Wordstar was the tool of the day and we programmed on  MBasic then ZBasic which was a compiled version. The PC was a revelation when we surpassed the performance of the 8086 processor. Fun times.

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Nice trip down memory lane.  I started on a mini computer in the late 60’s. Filled a small air conditioned room, input and output was via paper tape.  Moved on to a BBC Micro with 32k of RAM, most programs loaded via cassette tape (later upgraded to 5.25″ floppy disc).  Key programs such as WORD were saved in ROM.  Note that you typed *Word and the program was instantly available – so much for progress!  Moved on to an IBM PC. Who remembers the agony of squeezing programs into 640k of RAM not to mention HIMEM.sys and I see I still have my DOS manuals.  Happy days.

If you are in the UK and want to see the past visit the National Commuting Museum, http://www.tnmoc.org.  On the same site you can also see the original World War Two code breaking machines at Bletchley Park.  I spent a whole day there, my wife was not too amused.

 

Peter

 

 

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Cybertooth

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Wow, you people go way back.  I’m a relative new comer in comparison.  Around 1985 the company I worked for bought a couple of IBM 286 PS/2 computers with small hard drives and 5-1/4″ floppy drives.  I learned to use DOS and Lotus 123 on one of them.  That got me started with IBM computers, I had only fooled around with my brother’s Commodore 64 previously.

In 1993 I bought my first computer, an IBM 486, 25 MHz, PS/1 with a 300 MB HDD, 4 MB of RAM, 5-1/4″ and 3-1/2″ floppy drives, DOS 5, Win 3.1, and NO CD ROM drive.  That computer cost me $1800.00!  I upgraded it as much as I could and used it as my main computer until 1998.  I still have it and it still runs well.  Once in a while I fire it up and play some old games.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Cybertooth

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Charlie wrote:

Wow, you people go way back.

Don’t worry – we love having youngsters around.

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Charlie

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Charlie wrote:

In 1993 I bought my first computer, an IBM 486, 25 MHz, PS/1 with a 300 MB HDD, 4 MB of RAM, 5-1/4″ and 3-1/2″ floppy drives, DOS 5, Win 3.1, and NO CD ROM drive. That computer cost me $1800.00!

Interesting about the price. The first three PCs I bought (around 1984, 1989, 1995) each sold for $1500-1600, despite their different generations and capabilities. I remember thinking back then that maybe the idea was to keep the selling price of a PC at around the $1500 level.

By the time I got my Vista computer in 2008, that sales model had collapsed and I got a much better machine for less than $900. The difference was that it came with a lot less software and documentation.

Keep Running Windows 7 Safely for Years to Come  
Make Windows 10 look and work like Windows 7

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Yeah, I thought that price was high but then at that time I needed all the things that came with the computer itself.  These were naturally the “clicky” keyboard, a mouse, and a 14″ monitor, and also the 3-1/2″ floppy disks for DOS 5 and Windows 3.1.  The software “Works for Windows” was already installed on it too.

I also got books explaining in detail how to use DOS and Windows 3.1, as well as detailed information on the computer itself such as how and where to install additional main RAM, video RAM, and the CMOS battery.  I bought it at Sears so that may have increased the price a bit, but all and all I was very happy with what I got – and I went on to add more RAM, Put in a CD-ROM where the 5-1/4″ floppy was, and increased the modem size.

Being 20 something in the 70's was far more fun than being 70 something in the insane 20's

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Cybertooth

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Steve S. wrote:

“portable” versions of programs in Windows plus “flatpaks” in Linux. What’s old becomes new again.

And application folder in MacOS

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Great trip to the past. Certainly reminded me of how old I am. First met a computer, I think IBM 360, as a Midshipman at the Naval Academy. Punch cards and I am pretty sure we used Fortran. Any assignment would be run overnight, if you screwed up, another whole day to correct. Before I graduated in 1971 they joined a time-sharing terminal based system from I think Dartmouth using Basic. We were so happy to be able to work in real, if slow, time. I never worked directly with computers until after I left the Navy but did a lot of typing and printing on a large dedicated word processor with 7″ floppy discs (Xerox?), which I loved (as opposed to using an IBM Selectric typewriter). After leaving the Navy I went to grad school and immediately started looking into personal computers that could do word processing such as Kaypro and other CP/M machines. This was exactly when the IBM PC first appeared and it appealed to me but it was a bit too expensive. I got one of the first IBM compatibles, a dual floppy 128 K Columbia MPC which came with a software bundle called Perfect Writer, Perfect Calc, and Perfect Filer, a simple non-relational database. Also an Epson dot matrix printer. It did have a version of Basic but I did little programming until later (dBase mostly). I learned a lot from that mschine, later added a hard disc on a card and more memory. After graduation I did not use the degree for employment (a story for another day) but used my computer skills and reading of PC mags to land a job in sales in a computer store. Not well compensated but I became the main software troubleshooter (some great stories there) and learned more and moved to a much better position doing computer support in a healthcare provider network company. We had probably the largest PC based appication for processing claims in the country running a Clipper implementation of dBaseIII on a Novell network. Our servers had multiple massive (for the time) hard drives. I supported the night shift and did the backups and ran a kind of roll up program where the daily work on the PCs was posted to the server databases. I was there when we had to handle the year 2000 issues, which is a story on its own. We were eventually bought out by Aetna while working on reprogramming the main application into Informix SQL as the old application was all text based and limited  in some respects. In  2002? Aetna and some other health care insurers were having a hard time and most of us, including me, were laid off. I found other employment but continued to do PC support on my own, still have one customer I met at the computer store what, 40 years ago. He went from Word Perfect and dBaseIII to Word and Access today for his small business. Computing has been a large part of over half my life. I think I might expand this for my kids or into an article.

 

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wavy, SkipH, Cybertooth

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As so many others, I greatly enjoyed this trip down memory lane. Thanks for taking us along.

I got my start in computers right out of college working for the NYS Ed department in 1969 and continued programming in COBOL there and later in AZ through the late 1970’s.

Then we moved to Atlanta, had twins, and I became a stay-at-home mom.  I sure missed programming so in January 1983, I got my first IBM PC,  learned dBase and then Clipper and was able to find work I could do mostly from home. We’re back in NY now, but I still maintain a DOS program I wrote in the 1990’s.

 

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Cybertooth

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