Skip to main content

Now it's Personal

Image result for ibm 5150The IBM 5150, the pinnacle of Moore’s law. The IBM 5150 is one of the first computers that really brought the keyboard and processor to the home. It revolutionized the market and help set the standards that other computer of the past and even now follow. It is hard to believe that a decade before computers were the size of a bedroom room, needing to be cooled with an air conditioner and run by a group of 20 men to being able to sit on top of a desk with double the processing power.
Image result for ibm 5150The IBM 5150 was released on August 12, 1981 with relatively positive views. It was the first for the major computer company because they mostly dominated the office space, but began to be interested in the home market as IBM saw the growth of consumer pc. There was 40,000 IBM 5150 pc order on the day of the announcement and the numbers grew. This was a major blow towards IBM new competitors Apple and Atari and other smaller companies as IBM would also take over the new personal market as well as the office market too.


This segment I would mostly use to talk about how things work, but since it is a basic computer ( you know a processor, ram, etc) I feel that it is not as interesting to talk about. What I am going to talk about is how IBM was able to have the success they did with the 5150 and how they set standards for future computers to come. The 5150 was developed in 12 months which was the quickest development time in IBM’s history and the contributing factor of this is the off the shelf parts IBM used from it’s other computers. This made upgrades simple and easy and kept prices low. This help lead to a new set of computers, parts, and accessories called “IBM Compatible” These “compatibles” help standardize things such as the joystick port, floppy disk, printer port, Bios, and even the keyboard like mechanical keyboard, which have “satisfying” click to them.
Image result for ibm 5150 ad

Many computer enthusiast consider the 5150 as one of the best computers ever built. Not because of its specification especially now since a microwave probably has more processing power than it but because of how revolutionary it was. No other computer had such an impact on the personal computer market like it. It was a truly a well developed computer that became a role model for so many others to follow.



FUN FACT: IBM used Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp character in a series of advertisements to promote their home computers







source:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer#Reception

Comments

  1. AnonymousJanuary 29, 2018 at 6:44 PM

    Wow! The idea of taking a massive piece of machinery and compacting it into three small parts that could easily fit in a home office in such a short amount of time is very mind blowing and quite interesting. Now we can find these things in our pockets. Awesome blog.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dorito Power

Rotary engines, the official motor when burning oil is actually a good thing. The rotary engine or Wankel engine is much like chocolate ice cream in the car world, you hate it or you don’t. It is actually interesting concept because unlike other engine configurations, there is no cylinders. Instead they have a rotor which some claim to look like a Dorito spinning. The inventor of this odd engine was a Felix Wankel. Wankel was born in August 1902 in Lahr, Germany. He came up with the idea at the age of 17. It was only after 2 World Wars when he began working with NSU Mototenwerke in the research department without ever getting a degree or a driver license. He complete his design in 1954 and in 1957 and 1958 the prototypes were tested. In 1961 Mazda had contracted with NSU to produce the engine and install them in their cars. The engine was proven to be quite powerful in the 1960s and soon the engine was used by other car companies. The engine would began to lose its popularity in ...
3 comments
Read more

Produce, Crush, Recycle

EV1, the Prius of the late 1990s. I decided to celebrate Earth day with something that is the embodiment of going green… the electric car. I could have gone with Tesla or the previously mentioned Prius, but of course, those are cars as not obscure as the EV1 since they're either crashed or not legally allowed on the road anymore. The EV1, for those who did not see the video in Economics last year, stands for the creative name Electric Vehicle 1 and one of the first mass produce modern electric car. The car soon had a created major up roar by buyers because of GM repossession them and crushing them. The creation of the EV1 started when California CARB or California Air Resource Board in the 1990s started to impose stricter emission due to combat the horrible air pollution at the time. The air quality was so bad in California that it was worse than the other 49 states combined. Thus strongly encouraged major car companies like GM, Honda, Toyota, etc to create emission free veh...
3 comments
Read more

Just My Type

Typewriter, the official device of that satisfying click sound from the movies. Typewriters were once a popular form of typing up essays and document in a clear and formal way in which regular handwritten documents could not replicate. Now they are relics of the past due to the rise of personal computers, allowing so much for functionality with less hoops to jump through. The first commercially produced  typewriters appeared on scene in 1874, but became widespread in offices until the mid 1880s. Throughout this time there has been many manufactures and companies who added improvements over time. Historians believes that the typewriter was invented 52 time in some form by other inventors and thinkers. This helped to create competition and develope many types of typewriters. The common mechanical typewriters works like this, the keyboard is in the same order as the keys on a computer or on a digital one on a cellphone. When a is press, for example the F key, a lever swings...
2 comments
Read more