Jack Yan: the Persuader Blog: Twenty-ﬁve years of the IBM PC

It’s not much of a branding story, since it became so generic, but it certainly is signiﬁcant in the business world: today is the 25th anniversary of the IBM PC (courtesy Tom Peters’ wire blog). August 12, 1981 was when International Business Machines ﬁrst launched the PC, not expecting it to be a core part of its business.
Back then, I was impressed with the BBC Microcomputer and my Radoﬁn TV game console. At that age, I wasn’t aware of open architecture and the signiﬁcance of ‘IBM compatible’.
With 16 kbytes of memory, you couldn’t do much with it. No cool games. Just boring spreadsheets and business applications. Now, who would use those?

[PS.: Windows Firefox users, is the ﬁ ligature in the heading showing in the same font as the rest of the text on your computer?]

Posted by Jack Yan, 02:16 permalink

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Jack, I must say I saw a picture of this pc and I feel really old now, I feel like I just walked into a time machine. I still remember using one of these back in Marine Corp days.

# posted by

BlackOps: 8/12/2006 01:22:00 PM

I know how you feel. I won the IBM PC Computer Handbook as a prize in 1985, and back then the PC movement was really taking off. I still thought it was crappy because of the lack of games—shows where my priorities were in the 1980s.

# posted by

Jack Yan: 8/12/2006 11:30:00 PM

I remember one of these arriving at work, only for accounts or maybe word processing when free.

At the time I was doing artwork paste up (literally) for brochures with photo-set type, bullgum and a blade...

It wasn't that long ago, was it?

# posted by

Robin Capper: 8/13/2006 01:50:00 AM

I was reminiscing at our printer yesterday about how I would have to liaise with seven different parties on a magazine’s production—ﬁlm house, bromide house, typesetter, client, printer, designers, proofreaders … Did I miss anyone?
You are right—I was still doing some of this stuff as late as 1992 on some jobs.

# posted by

Jack Yan: 8/13/2006 03:11:00 AM

I still remember driving across town, in evening peak traffic, to get a missing "t" from the typesetters to finish a job after finding a typo.
Was nearly an hour to get 1 "t"!

# posted by

Robin Capper: 8/13/2006 04:05:00 AM