The IBM PC: 25 Years Old

Twenty five years ago tomorrow, IBM introduced the IBM 5150, the first of the modern era personal computers, a machine that would spark the countless changes in the computing world and send us hurtling towards the world we live in today.  While not the first attempt to build an end-user accessible machine, the Apple II was already on the market and selling very well, the IBM PC had the power and prestige of IBM behind it, at the time the absolute king of the business computing market.  Perhaps the biggest advantage the IBM PC had over the competition, and what saw it surviving the ups and downs of the 1980's turbulent technology market was it's open architecture, so anyone could make hardware that was compatible with the system.  A shift from an age where most hardware manufacturers were attempting to lock their platforms down so only they could sell expansion parts.

The IBM PC came with Microsoft BASIC on a ROM chip, but if you wanted an Operating System, you had to buy a copy of PC-DOS, the first DOS offering from Microsoft (it would later vanish into obscurity as MS-DOS took its place in the market).  It had no hard disk, but it did come with a staggering 16 or 64kB of RAM (expandable to 256kB) depending on the configuration you purchased, and ran on the Intel 8088 processor clocked at 4.77MHz.

While the 5150 was not a huge success in the consumer market, it sold like gangbusters in the business world due to IBM's long-standing dominance of the corporate space.  Like the saying goes today "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft", the same definitely held true for IBM.  The IBM XT and XT/370s managed much better in the consumer market, and it wasn't until the PCjr in November of 1983 that IBM lost it's grip on the PC market and began to see market-share gobbled up by beige-box competitors like Packard-Bell and Compaq.

The IBM PC moved the concept of personal computing out of the realm of the hobbyist and computer nerd and made them essential business tools.  Its open architecture also sparked the hardware explosion that would allow anyone with the engineering chops to build compatible components to expand system capabilities.  It allowed for the clone market to exist, which allowed for greater competition, innovation in hardware, price wars etc.  While it wasn't intentional (IBM intended to license it's BIOS technology), IBM created the modern PC hardware market.

So here we are, a quarter of a century later, the computer I'm working on right now is a 2.8GHz processor, that's over 600 times more powerful than the first IBM PC.  We've moved way beyond PC-DOS with Windows XP and soon Vista.  IBM has exited the PC and laptop market completely and is refocusing on enterprise software solutions.  And now, Microsoft is claiming that we're nearing the end of the PC Era (Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, said this in a shareholder meeting last month).  What's next?  What's going to be the next revolutionary step forward?