How Far We’ve Come Since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981

I published this in December 2013. As we approach Christmas and the New Year, thinking of family, reflecting on the past, and anticipating the future, I thought you’d get a kick out of this 1984 Christmas commercial of an IBM PC, as well as my personal reflections of its history.

I bought one of the original IBM PCs in August 1981 for about $5,000. With inflation, that would be over $17,000 in 2024. The only way I could afford it was because I got an IBM employee discount with payments taken out of my monthly pay check. And with that help, I ordered a full-blown system.

FEATURES:

• 4.77 MHz processor, maxed out 64K RAM,
• not one but two single-side 120KB diskette drives (instead of using a cassette tape recorder),
• monochrome display (instead of connecting to the TV),
• 300 bps telephone modem (bits per second, not Kbps, Mbps or Gbps),
• IBM DOS 1.0,
• BASIC,
• EasyWriter word processor,
• VisiCalc spreadsheet,
• Asynchronous Communications Program, and
• Early Games (a kids game for my son, Adrian).

I started Adrian on the PC at age 2, sitting him on my lap and using a piece of cardboard to mask off most of the keyboard so only the number keypad was visible. Early Games started by teaching the shapes of numbers — a 3 looks like an 8 but with its loops open on the left, and a 5 looks like an upside-down 2. Today Adrian is 40, and he has two kids of his own.

Kids these days start using smartphones and tablet computers at even earlier ages. And our elderly parents age 82 and over can also use them, as discussed in An iPad for All Ages.

Oh by the way, even my Philips Sonicare toothbrush has an embedded microprocessor that’s faster than that the original IBM PC – much faster. If measured in millions of instructions per second, it’s actually ten times faster than the $3.5 million IBM mainframe I worked on in the mid-1970’s. The iPhone 4, introduced in 2010, was about 5,000 times faster than that mainframe. And, my Apple iBook Air, with M2 processor, has a 16-core dedicated neural engine capable of executing 15.8 trillion operations per second. That’s over 15 million times faster than the mainframe that once supported the nation’s largest hospitals, banks, and airlines with hundreds of simultaneous users; and it’s all mine.

I find it amazing that all of us can have that much computing power in our pockets, or on our wrists, with wireless access to all the information on the world wide web. How time flies — exponentially, according to Moore’s Law.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wayne Caswell is a retired IBM technologist, futurist, market strategist, consumer advocate, sleep economist, and founding editor of Modern Health Talk. With international leadership experience developing wireless networks, sensors, and smart home technologies, he’s been an advocate for Big Broadband and fiber-to-the-home while also enjoying success lobbying for consumers. Wayne leans left to support progressive policies but considers himself politically independent. (contact & BIO)

For Perspective

I started my 30-year IBM career in 1969 as a punch card operator while taking data processing courses at Northern Virginia Community College. I share this image to show how much 5 megabytes (million characters) would look like if stored on punched cards. Besides running the punch card equipment, I would also hand wire the control boards of some of the machines. My college career took me to Florida Institute of Technology during the Apollo space program, where I studied Computer Science when there were just three universities teaching it. College then took several detours because of the Vietnam War, and I eventually ended up with three Associate Degrees and a Bachelor of Science in Technology of Management from American University. While at IBM, the company invested in me by sending me to 1-2 months of continuing education per year to take technology, management, and personal development classes. The more intense 1-week classes were at Harvard, Princeton, and other major universities and were the equivalent of graduate college courses but without the academic credentials. That strategy worked well for the company, because it lessened the chance that I’d seek other jobs elsewhere.