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08/12/1981 AD released

IBM releases the IBM PC, created by a team of engineers and designers directed by Don Estridge in Boca Raton. Pricing started at $1,565 for a configuration with 16 KB RAM, Color Graphics Adapter, and no disk drives. The price was designed to compete with comparable machines in the market.

The design process was kept under a policy of strict secrecy, with all other IBM divisions kept in the dark about the project.

Several CPUs were considered, including the Texas Instruments TMS9900, Motorola 68000 and Intel 8088. The 68000 was considered the best choice, but was not production-ready like the others. The IBM 801 RISC processor was also considered, since it was considerably more powerful than the other options, but rejected due to the design constraint to use off-the-shelf parts.

IBM chose the 8088 over the similar but superior 8086 because Intel offered a better price for the former and could provide more units, and the 8088's 8-bit bus reduced the cost of the rest of the computer. The 8088 had the advantage that IBM already had familiarity with the 8085 from designing the IBM System/23 Datamaster. The 62-pin expansion bus slots were also designed to be similar to the Datamaster slots, and its keyboard design and layout became the Model F keyboard shipped with the PC, but otherwise the PC design differed in many ways.

IBM initially announced intent to support multiple operating systems: CP/M-86, UCSD p-System, and an in-house product called IBM PC DOS, developed by Microsoft. In practice, IBM's expectation and intent was for the market to primarily use PC DOS, CP/M-86 was not available for six months after the PC's release and received extremely few orders once it was, and p-System was also not available at release. PC DOS rapidly established itself as the standard OS for the PC and remained the standard for over a decade, with a variant being sold by Microsoft themselves as MS-DOS.

Prior to the 1980s, IBM had largely been known as a provider of business computer systems. As the 1980s opened, their market share in the growing minicomputer market failed to keep up with competitors, while other manufacturers were beginning to see impressive profits in the microcomputer space. The market for personal computers was dominated at the time by Tandy, Commodore and Apple, whose machines sold for several hundred dollars each and had become very popular. The microcomputer market was large enough for IBM's attention, with $15 billion in sales by 1979 and projected annual growth of more than 40% during the early 1980s. Other large technology companies had entered it, such as Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments and Data General, and some large IBM customers were buying Apples.

Boca Raton, FL

Lattitude: 26.3686° N
Longitude: 80.1° W
Region: North America