Happy 35th Birthday, IBM PC! In honor of it, some GREAT vintage ads

[Cooley Hurd]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer

Debut[edit]
IBM is proud to announce a product you may have a personal interest in. It's a tool that could soon be on your desk, in your home or in your child's schoolroom. It can make a surprising difference in the way you work, learn or otherwise approach the complexities (and some of the simple pleasures) of living.

It's the computer we're making for you.
—?IBM PC advertisement, 1982[52]

After developing it in 12 months—faster than any other hardware product in company history—IBM announced the Personal Computer on 12 August 1981. Pricing started at US$1,565 (equivalent to $4,073 in 2015) for a configuration with 16K RAM, Color Graphics Adapter, and no disk drives. The company intentionally set prices for it and other configurations that were comparable to those of Apple and other rivals;[53][23][5][36][17] one analyst stated that IBM "has taken the gloves off",[1] while the company said "we suggest [the PC's price] invites comparison".[54] Microsoft, Personal Software, and Peachtree Software were among the developers of nine launch titles, including EasyWriter and VisiCalc.[53] In addition to the existing corporate sales force IBM opened its own Product Center retail stores. After studying Apple's successful distribution network, the company for the first time sold through others, ComputerLand and Sears Roebuck.[53][19][4][20][5] Because retail stores receive revenue from repairing computers and providing warranty service, IBM broke a 70-year tradition by permitting and training non-IBM service personnel to fix the PC.

BYTE described IBM as having "the strongest marketing organization in the world", but the PC's marketing also differed from that of previous products. The company was aware of its corporate reputation among potential customers; an early advertisement began "Presenting the IBM of Personal Computers".[52][55][5] The advertisements emphasized the novelty of an individual owning an IBM computer, describing "a product you may have a personal interest in"[52] and asking readers to think of "'My own IBM computer. Imagine that' ... it's yours. For your business, your project, your department, your class, your family and, indeed, for yourself."

A compilation of PC ads from the early 80's:

[scscholar]

1. Because single-tasking and eight character filenames were just so great.

Microsoft and IBM set the entire computer industry back a decade with this disaster.

[LoverOfLiberty]

3. PC hate

right out the gate.

You have no idea what you are talking about.

[scscholar]

7. And if you don't understand just how far behind DOS is....

then I just don't know what to say. Microsoft destroyed an entire decade for the computer industry.

[LoverOfLiberty]

8. Just because you say it

doesn't make it true.

I've been in this industry since the early 80s. Microsoft created the market for personal computers and it continues to lead the way. Now we can argue whether Apple is better than the PC until the cows come home, but to deny IBM and Microsoft their rightful credit is being willfully ignorant.

[scscholar]

10. So you can't defend your point so you make-up a ridiculous strawman?

I said *nothing* about Apple. Yes, they were better, but they weren't the leader in the late 80s like Sun was. In some ways thirty years later, my Sun was still better than the Microsoft garbage that is being shoved down our throats now. I live in the Seattle area, so the Microsoft garbage is strong here. It is forced upon us and makes the lives of technical people an absolute hell. It makes me want to die.

[LoverOfLiberty]

11. Sun was never the leader in the personal computer space

and if I remember correctly, that is what this post is about.

Makes you want to die? Lives of technical people an absolute hell?

I'm out.

[scscholar]

21. I'm going to be up all night restoring a Microsoft SQL database...

that was corrupted since the hardrive filled. Yes, we should have kept closer watch on the diskspace, but running out of diskspace shouldn't corrupt your database and blue screen of death your server. Working an extra eight+ hours without pay all night on a Friday night is my definition of hell, especially since I'm not 100% confident in our backups.

[LoverOfLiberty]

22. I run an IT shop

with 50+ SQL servers and hundreds of databases. Have not had that problem in the 19 years I've been here.

Now, I will give you that Exchange 5.0 had some database issues that had me up all night doing a restore.

But to paint Microsoft with the brush you have for essentially failing to do a good job of system administration is a bit unfair.

[hunter]

17. He's right.

That machine and it's operating system was a rat bastard.

It seems IBM didn't want to build anything into the PC that might compete with their mainframe business. (If that's not the case, then some of their design decisions were... strange.) The PC was crippled out of the box. The PCjr home computer was even worse.

Unfortunately for IBM, they didn't nail the specs down tight enough to prevent clones, but even the clone PCs were an impediment to human progress.

You have no idea how ugly the machine was.

I'm posting this from an ARM machine. The machine's underlying operating system is Linux. Linux is a work-alike of BSD. I first used BSD in the late 'seventies. It was my first real operating system. In comparison, MS-DOS was a toy.

Originally ARM stood for Acorn RISC machine, a successor to the 6502 microprocessor. All modern microprocessors, even modern PC x86 processors, have been strongly influenced by RISC architectures. Complex instructions in modern processors are broken down and processed as simple instructions.

ARM microprocessors are in everything now, cell phones, tablets, routers, netbooks, and so on. The PC-ness of any modern PC or Apple desktop product is essentially a RISC-like hardware emulation of the traditional x86 instruction set.

I have a couple of old PCs in my garage, including an original IBM PC with a full height floppy disk and a full height 10 megabyte hard drive. I also have a few interesting clones. I don't have to start the actual machine up to play with it, it's fully emulated on my current machines. I can even write new PC programs using Borland Turbo-Pascal or GWBASIC if I please, and run this new software on the old machines. All I need is the appropriate usb to serial adapter.

The last Microsoft product I used at home was Windows 98SE. I won't trouble myself with Microsoft or Apple products anymore unless someone is paying me. I'm most at home using Debian, "the universal operating system." It's been ported to many different machines, even experimental processor designs.

[LoverOfLiberty]

23. As I said

I've been working on computers since the early 80s.

If Unix and all of its flavors was so superior, why are the overwhelming majority of computers not running it?

[MyNameGoesHere]

13. Apple set it back even further

by choosing NeXTSTEP over BeOS. Stupidest thing I ever saw. But kind of glad too, at least it wasn't lost to a closed source manufacturer and lives on.

[NBachers]

18. I still miss my GeoWorks

[hunter]

19. BeOS is still being developed by a few die-hard fans as Haiku.

https://www.haiku-os.org/

Progress on Apple desktop machines was sluggish until Apple embraced BSD and PC hardware.

Dealing with low level hardware issues is frustrating, especially when you see that people in Open Source communities have already solved a particular problem.

Haiku utilizes FreeBSD stuff in a similar manner.

[PSPS]

2. Bill Scudder, the mime who played "The Tramp," won 11 Cleo awards.

The ad agency Lord, Geller, Federico, and Einstein won the IBM contract and it was they who came up with Chaplin's Tramp character. So IBM bought the rights to the tramp from Bubbles, the Chaplin family organization. They made many different commercials and they were both successful and iconic.

[sinkingfeeling]

4. As an IBM employee, I had to enter a "lottery" to get one. I got

a low number and drove to Charlottesville to pick it up in July of 1982. It's currently in my attic with an entire library of instruction books.

[lpbk2713]

6. I didn't keep mine.

It would have taken up too much room. The monitor and the keyboard
would have to be kept also because the plugs were unique to this model
PC. I still have my first Wang 386 though. Gigantic 40 MB HDD.

[sinkingfeeling]

15. Got all of it and 3 or 4 others that came out over the years.

[CaptainTruth]

5. My 1st computer was a Timex-Sinclair 2068 (still have it in the box), then an IBM XT.

Think I got the XT in 1982 or 1983, just out of high school.

[hunter]

20. I have a 2068. I also have the thermal printer. That's a weird and wonderful machine.

wikipedia

The keyboard was horrible. The manual was fascinating, written by people who had more formal education in computer science than Bill Gates. Programs were stored on an ordinary cassette recorder.

The first computer I owned that was usable for writing was an Atari 800. I had an Epson LX-80 printer, a floppy drive, a serial adapter, and a 300 baud modem. The word processor I used was Paperclip.

Orson Scott Card was writing on an Atari 800 too.

[Omaha Steve]

9. Our first home PC

We still have 2. We have all kinds of upgrades, after market stuff, most of the games and programs. We ran a BBS on one of them at 300/1200 baud.

OS

[6chars]

12. It sold for $1565.

About the price of a good business user's laptop today.

We've come a long way, baby.

[backscatter712]

14. My first computer was an Atari 400.

Started off with a cassette drive. Yes, programs loaded off of cassette tapes. Took 15 minutes for a 32 kilobyte program, and often errored out if the tape was screwy.

Later, we upgraded to a floppy disk drive. 5 1/4 inch floppies that were actually floppy. But quite the luxury when compared to the tapes.

That Atari did have some awesome games. I still have it in a closet.

[Ms. Toad]

16. Vic 20, then Commodore 64 for me.

I taught programming on the latter for most of a decade.

(Although around the same time I participated in an industrial/academic summer intership with IBM testing/editing an early intranet.)