This week marks the tenth anniversary of IBM Corp’s launch of the original Personal Computer, which arguably laid the seeds for the end of IBM’s dominance of the world computer industry, although that did not become apparent for another five or six years: there has been some frantic rewriting of history going on so that some are claiming that the launch was the birth of the personal computer era where in fact Apple Computer Inc had achieved over the previous five years with the success of the Apple II – as for business microcomputing, the Apple II slugged it out with Digital Research Inc’s CP/M, and MS-DOS was an attempt to repeat the success 8-bit CP/M on a crypto-16-bit microprocessor; IBM is making out that the 4.77MHz 8088 it used was advanced for its time – in fact IBM itself had already been using the uncrippled 8086 in the Displaywriter for three years; the specification was impressive for an IBM product for the time, but the mere 160Kb on the floppy was regarded as mean, as was the 16Kb minimum memory configuration – most CP/M machines had higher capacity floppies and 64Kb memory in 1981; IBM helpfully points out that in today’s dollars, the typical configuration of 64Kb memory, one 160Kb floppy, colour display adaptor and PC-DOS – $2,665 at the time, works out at $3,950 in 1991; to celebrate, IBM has started shipping the 50MHz upgrade option for its PS/2 Models 90 and 95 XP 486, which enables the machines to deliver 50 times the power of the original machine the board costs $3,700 when you trade in a 33MHz CPU, $5,345 when you had a 25MHz one, $7,425 when all you’ve got to turn in is a 20MHz 80486SX.
