On August 12, 1981, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, IBM presented the first PC: it was the IBM/PC 5150 model and the acronym correspond to personal computer in English, because at that time most computers were businessor university, and giants.A few years before (in 1977) Apple was born;In the middle, Comodore and Texas Instruments.It was a market that was estimated small, niche, but it didn't turn out like this: IBM expected to sell 241.000 computers in 5 years: it reached that number in a month.
"That number was greater than all computers installed by IBM until then," Mark Dean told La Nacion, one of the engineers behind the first PC (the Dirty Dozen), a few years ago -.That was all I needed to convince the financial area, put a larger number would have been nonsense."
The end of the 70s was a period of much technological effervescence: in addition to Apple, Atari emerged in 1977;A few years before Xerox had developed the high computer, with graphic interface and mouse (the engineers who had previously developed, together with Bob Engelbart, the first mouse) participated;At the beginning of the Intel decade he had debuted with his first chip, the 4004, revolutionary for being the first general purpose, that is, he did not have a single function, but could adapt as the software required and that opened the game toThe possibility of creating economic computers and, above all, personal.
In 1978, the Pioneer Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext in 1965, gave a talk in IBM in which he talked about distributed and accessible systems all over the world for anyone, which went against the way Ibm then moved, then,With centralized, expensive and monolithic systems.The talk left William Lowe, an IBM executive. Lowe (que murió en 2014) tenía 33 años entonces, y estaba a cargo del desarrollo de equipos “económicos" de IBM (servidores pequeños, con un costo de entre 90 y 50.000 dollars) but understood that Intel processors, computers that were appearing and novel devices such as the HP-35 pocket calculator, the first in their kind, were going to have a direct impact on their business.His resellers also asked him to use standard pieces to be able to make repairs on his own, and not have to send the equipment to the IBM centers, something that was expensive and slow.
The need to have a cheap computer
So he spoke with Frank Cary, the then CEO of IBM, and proposed to make a personal computer so as not to stay out of that business, with a price of $ 1500.But with a caveat.“We could not do things in the IBM style, developing all our components;That implied bureaucracy and a lot of time. Teníamos dos opciones: comprar una compañía de microcomputadoras (sugerí Atari), o hacer nuestra versión, pero usando componentes estándar", le explicó a LA NACION en 2011.They were necessary to appeal to external components, pieces that were already in the market, accelerate the process and, at the same time, the price to the computer that Lowe dreamed to compete with Apple, Sinclair, Tandy and other manufacturers.
Cary approved Lowe in charge and gave him a mission: having a ready prototype in a month.So Lowe called engineers that he knew about the Datamaster project, who were already working on a computer with an Intel chip (contrary to what IBM was then doing, which was to develop all components on his own).They were twelve engineers, who moved to an IBM factory in Boca Mouse, Florida.They are known as the Dirty Dozen (the dirty dozen), alluding to the film twelve of the gate.Don Estridge took over the now known Coss project.The twelve originals were joined by other engineers, notably Mark Dean (who created the interface to use a monitor or a TV with the PC and was 25 years old then), Dave Bradley (the inventor of the control-alt-delete) with 31Years, Noel Fallwell and Patty Mchugh (the only woman in the group).
Patty Mchugh was responsible for creating the Motherboard, the motherboard where the rest of the hardware components of a computer are welded and connected;Until then everything was done more rudimentary, with cables and elements arranged without too much order, and forcing the entire computer firmware to rewritten (the code that allows the different components to speak with each other, beyond the operating system). Por eso a McHugh se la conoce como la “madre de la placa madre": ella tuvo la idea de estandarizar la manera en que los diferentes elementos de hardware se conectarían a la placa base de la computadora, permitiendo su actualización sin tener que rediseñar todo desde cero.
Bill Gates enters the scene
In January 1981 there were already 135, although everything was done in secret.So much, that Intel engineers could not see the equipment, and had to be guided by an oscilloscope to detect, on the other side of a black sheet, what could be wrong.IBM chose the Intel 8088 chip over others of similar performance for a very simple reason: it was cheaper, courtesy of Earl Whettone, a Intel chips seller who understood the convenience of having IBM as a client.But a computer needs an operating system to stop being a lot of electronics.IBM did not have time to develop its own, so in July 1980 it went to Gary Kildall, which at that time had the most popular operating system in the world, known as CP/M.
CP/M was an command line operating system;Three years were missing for Apple.IBM executives went to visit Kildall (the reader remembers: this was 40 years ago; the communications were handled differently) and were received by Kildall's wife, who had gone to fly his plane.There was no agreement (partly because for c/pm what IBM proposed was a priori, a minor business) and the engineers behind the PC had to think of an alternative.
The solution was offered by Bill Gates (who was 24 years old and had founded Microsoft in 1975), then known for having made a version of Basic programming language for Altair 8800, and who had recommended talking to Kildall.Gates did not waste time: he bought Tim Paterson, for 25.000 dollars, the QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System, a clone of CP/M), and hired him to work on the PC.When the IBM PC went on sale, the operating system was called PC-DOS.Gary Kildall learned, saw the QDOS and the similarities with his own product, and threatened to sue IBM;Finally the CP/M was offered as an alternative operating system for the PC.
The greeting of the three fingers
“My participation in the design of the first PC was to write the code that controls the hardware (the diskettera, the keyboard), something that people do not see directly.But there is something I also did and that surely everyone knows: I chose the combination of control keys, alt and delete to restart the machine. Lamentablemente, fue un invento popular", le dijo Dave Bradley a LA NACION en 2001.
Bradley wrote the BIOS (Basic Input Output System), the code that coordinates the operation of the keyboard, the discs, the printer, the serial ports, and so on.And although they could test each line of code in one of the prototypes, "not everyone could do it, and it was expected that the new applications would have errors in the code, which would hang the machine," Bradley said, "and I didn't want to have to turn it off, turn it onand wait for the operating system to be loaded every time this happened.That is why I put the restart function with the keyboard.I chose control, alt and delete because the first two were only on the left, well away from the other, which also has a good negative feeling (delete means deleting, in English). Lo decidí en 5 minutos; lamentablemente para la historia, no me pasé una semana dándole vueltas al asunto".
A summer of fury
In April 1981 the computer design was ready, and in August it was presented at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. IBM la promocionaba como una computadora “para los negocios, la escuela y el hogar" (una multiplicidad de usos novedosa para la época), a un precio muy atractivo: 1565 dólares de la época.If it was paid almost double there was a monochromatic monitor, although it could be used with a conventional television.You could choose between using the PC-dos ($ 40) or the CP/m of KLDALL for 240 dollars.
The IBM PC 5150 had an 8088 Intel chip to 4.77 megahertz, 16 kilobytes of RAM and another 50 kb of reading memory only.Among the accessories were a monitor, a printer, two 5.25 ″ dysketteters, an adapter for games, application packages and extra RAM (up to a maximum of 256 KB).The equipment could be purchased without a diskettera, to load the programs recorded in a conventional cassettera.
“It was not the first team in the market, but it managed to be successful because we used an open architecture, with standard components.He had no better design than the Apple at the time, ”said Mark Dean in an interview with La Nacion years ago - but we opened the game to participate others, we publish the design and the code, and by allowing the creation of a compatible system and also ofadapters and plates made by third parties we create an industry. Además esto nos permitía encontrar más rápido errores en el código o el diseño, porque había más gente mirando eso".
IBM estimated to sell a few units, less than 250.000 in five years (in 1977, to have a reference, the entire industry sold less than 50.000 computers).But they fell short.Only in 1983 IBM sold more than 750.000 teams.In April 2002, 20 years after the debut of the IBM PC, one billion computers X86 had been sold, manufactured by IBM or their competitors (which in the 80s were called clones).In 2007, the 2000 million PC marked was exceeded.