You Say You Want a (PC) Revolution

Aug. 10 -- The news media are full of stories this week celebrating the 20th anniversary of the personal computer.

But the truth is, when IBM released its first PC in August 1981, it was hardly entering virgin territory. Vendors such as Apple Computer, Tandy, and Commodore — just to name a few — had begun exploring that terrain since the mid-'70s.

What IBM does deserve credit for is taking a niche movement and transforming it into a full-blown consumer revolution.

Birth of a Religion

“Other people created it, but it wasn’t really legitimate until IBM came in and blessed it,” said Fred Davis, a computer historian and CEO of Lumeria. “It’s as if IBM were the Pope, and the guys over at Apple with their long hair were the religious figures who wound up getting crucified. But, you know it was IBM and those guys that blessed the PC and turned it into a profitable religion.”

In August of 1980, IBM pooled its 12 best engineers into a task force charged with drawing up the guidelines for the IBM personal computer. Known as the “dirty dozen,” the group had to come up with the new computer’s design, inside and out, and do it quickly: IBM wanted to get into the PC market before anyone else’s product became the de facto standard.

‘We Had No Idea’

This need for speed forced IBM to look to outside vendors for help. Big Blue turned to Intel for its chip architecture and signed on a little-known software firm called Microsoft to provide the operating system. According to dirty dozen team member David Bradley, he and his colleagues had no idea that the project they were working on — code-named Chess — would fundamentally transform the way people worked and played.

“We had no idea that the IBM PC would turn out to be as successful as it did,” Bradley recalled. “In fact, our sales estimates back then predicted we’d sell about 250,000 machines.”