A Little Respect for a 20-Year-Old

Stephen Manes

Twenty years ago, the original IBM PC taught the world that simple, flexible, and open systems beat complicated, inflexible, and closed ones--and it became the most widely imitated computer in history. Today, it gets virtually no respect. Aging techies blithely declare that long before the IBM PC's August 1981 debut, users could choose among dozens of equally capable models without the three famous initials. Apple fanatics mock DOS's command-line interface and remind us that the juggernaut of mice and icons began with the Macintosh and its big sister, Lisa. To hear the revisionists tell it, the PC was some sort of inconsequential historical anomaly.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. I was there to watch IBM almost single-handedly change a PC market dominated by hobbyists into one aimed primarily at helping people get work done. Strikingly, no single conspicuous element led to the PC's success. The attractiveness of the overall package was what made it a winner.

More Complete, Less Geeky

Why did I plunk down my money for an IBM PC instead of one from Apple or one of the many options from now-forgotten makers like Northstar and Cromemco? For openers, service: I'd been a satisfied user of IBM's Selectric typewriters, and the company was willing not only to fix anything that might go wrong but also to finance my purchase. That wasn't a trivial consideration for a computer worth more than my car.

Other monitors often exhibited flickery, blocky text. IBM's green-on-black display delivered highly readable, rock-solid characters. The much-maligned keyboard had layout oddities, but it easily beat competitors that sometimes lacked even arrow keys.

IBM systems were more complete and less geeky than the competition's. Getting an Apple II to display lowercase characters required installing an extra card. Setting up a CP/M machine could mean learning how to connect and configure a terminal. Not so with IBM's PC. And the machine's biggest advantage was its flexible but awkward-to-program 20-bit addressing. That let the IBM PC handle 16 times more memory than the 64KB typical of older machines, permitting faster, more-sophisticated programs like Lotus 1-2-3.

The Legacy Lives On

Revisionists insist that IBM's big mistake was to let Microsoft license DOS to all comers. But earlier small IBM machines with proprietary operating systems had already failed, and hindsight shows us exactly what happens when you keep an operating system proprietary and closed: the Macintosh's marginalization. Microsoft's ability to sell DOS elsewhere created a broader platform for independent software developers--and thus more DOS software.

IBM's real failure stemmed from its fear that PCs would cannibalize sales of its more expensive machines--as they inevitably did. Instead of setting out to dominate the lucrative add-on market, the world's biggest computer hardware company stupidly tried to defend its high-end business. Since its products were exorbitantly priced, third parties stepped in to fill demand for serial ports, multipurpose cards, modems, and so on. I kept my original PC running for more than seven years with various upgrades. The only one labeled "IBM" was a revised boot ROM.

When clones and new luggable designs arrived from unknown upstarts like Compaq, IBM reacted by delivering inferior products at significantly higher prices. The market did the rest. Still, in the face of competition from dinky but capable microcomputers, only IBM among the major computer firms of the time managed to create a real PC business at all. Without exception, the PC efforts put forward by competitors like Digital Equipment, Xerox, and Wang were utterly clueless.

The legacy of the PC lives on at Microsoft, which went to school on IBM's mistakes. You can see it in the company's constant attempts to co-opt any new development that threatens to minimize the Windows PC's dominance--from cell phones to set-top boxes. The IBM PC's brutal lesson is this: If somebody's going to devour your business, it might as well be you.

PC World Contributing Editor Stephen Manes is a cohost of Digital Duo, a series that has appeared on public television stations nationwide. He has written about PCs for nearly two decades.