30 Years On: The Legacy of the IBM PC

The original IBM PC.

IBM released the original IBM PC on August 12, 1981 - 30 years ago. At the time, the Apple II had made significant inroads in the education and business markets, while several competitors - including Atari, Commodore, and Radio Shack - were fighting over market share in the home computer market.

The IBM PC marked a watershed moment for the five-year-old "home computer" market and legitimized the personal computer (PC) as a business tool, and it was priced comparably to an Apple II system, so home users bought it as well. The IBM PC is the foundation upon which the bulk of the PC world is built, starting with the x86 CPU and DOS and running through today's x86 CPUs and Windows. (Ironically, IBM sold off its PC business years ago and now makes rivals to the Intel x86 CPU.)

The Macintosh arrived as a rival platform 3-1/2 years later, and Linux has developed into a solid alternative to Windows over the past 20 years, but neither platform has made much of a dent in Microsoft's dominance.

Today we look at the legacy of the IBM PC - and the World of Windows that grew from it. Our writers share the impact IBM had on the industry and how it has impacted them.

Austin Leeds (Apple Everywhere): I've basically been x86 and PowerPC compatible all my life. From an early age, I've been using both, but nowadays I lean more toward ARM, for obvious reasons. When I use x86, I prefer Linux or Mac. My irritation with Windows goes beyond the average fanboy - I take issue with Microsoft over the NSA key in Windows.

The IBM PC was a wakeup call for the rest of the market - an iPad of the 80s, if you will. It really inaugurated the desktop personal computer era and helped standardize the size and shape of desktops for years to come. Only with the introduction of the iPad have we really seen the legacy of the IBM PC truly start to fade.

Dan Bashur (Apple, Tech, and Gaming): We owe a lot to the IBM PC. "Big Blue" developed a machine that was affordable enough for small businesses and powerful enough for large enterprises. If you want a good history lesson on the birth of DOS and the x86 platform, visit the History of Computers website beginning with History of the IBM PC.

Why is this relevant to Apple, myself, and any other Mac fanatics? Without IBM pushing the personal computer industry into the mainstream, along with developments from Intel (x86) and Microsoft (DOS and Windows), the timing of the first Macintosh and the development of Mac OS may have been quite different. I fully believe that the GUI interface of Mac OS was a thundering response to differentiate Apple's offerings from the command line interface of DOS. This response - and Apple's track record of keeping innovations in both hardware and software engineering/design one step ahead of traditional Wintel boxes - has made Apple what it is today.

As a sidebar, perhaps the most bitter irony throughout the history of Apple, IBM, and Intel's involvement with the manufacturing of personal computers (namely Macs) was the deal struck between Apple and Intel in late 2005, turning former rivals into partners and eliminating the PowerPC platform (which IBM was involved with). I'm still secretly hoping for Apple to go back to IBM and the PowerPC platform someday and revive the PowerBook and Power Macintosh names (including reviving compatibility for all legacy applications), but we're more likely to see iOS and OS X merge together with cloud computing (iCloud) and see the elimination of traditional computers entirely instead. It's amazing how far things have changed in three decades.

Dan Knight (Mac Musings): I remember the day in the summer of 1981 when the first truckload of IBM PCs arrived at ComputerLand of Grand Rapids. We had been Apple's first dealership in Michigan, and we carried a wide variety of brands - Commodore, Atari, Osborn, Texas Instruments, and others I can't recall at the moment. Apple was so supremely confident of its position that it welcomed IBM to the industry in an ad, stating:

"Welcome, IBM. Seriously. Welcome to the most exciting and important marketplace since the computer revolution began 35 years ago. And congratulations on your first personal computer. Putting real computer power in the hands of the individual is already improving the way people work, think, learn, communicate, and spend their leisure hours."

The IBM PC was modeled on the Apple II: off-the-shelf components, standard expansion slots, and lots of add-ons, such as graphics cards (Apple built video into the computer, but with the PC you had to buy a card), floppy controllers and drives, serial and parallel cards, etc. The biggest difference was that the PC didn't include an operating system - and IBM gave you three choices. DOS became the standard, but even IBM didn't know that was going to happen.

Apple turned in a different direction with Lisa and Macintosh, using a black-and-white graphical user interface that displayed different typefaces and styles, putting to focus on attractive output, not just words on a page. Microsoft saw the threat and began to develop Windows, which added a GUI to DOS along with mouse control. It's been playing catchup ever since.

Charles Moore (several columns): I haven't spent a lot of keyboard time on DOS/Windows machines over the years. My limited experience to what used to be called the "IBM compatible" world has never enticed me to explore it more thoroughly when I had access to perfectly good Macs as an alternative.

Macintosh Plus

We did have an ancient 286 no-name IBM PC clone running DOS something-or-other at the time I bought my first Mac - a used compact desktop Plus, from a friend. The difference was striking - and not in the DOS machine's favor.

Many years later I had an IBM ThinkPad of about the same vintage as my Pismo PowerBooks here for a while. It was a solid-feeling, albeit somewhat crude and clunky, boat-anchor heavy machine with a good keyboard, but it was running Windows XP, which I detested.

However, the historical significance of the IBM PC can't be discounted, and arguably today's Macs have bloodlines more in common with those early days 286 and 386 PCs than they do with the Macs of two decades ago. Late '80s and early '90s Macs had SCSI hard drives (if at all), used SCSI as their high-speed interface, used ADB mice and keyboards, and were powered by Motorola processors.

Today, Macs have SATA hard drives (the same as PCs), use USB keyboards and mice - the same as PCs, albeit with different keyboard mapping, and are powered by Intel x86 processors, as was my prehistoric 286, and the same as PCs today. Macs now even do Windows. One of the biggest hardware distinctions remaining is that the PC community has been quick to embrace the USB 3.0 high-speed interface, while Apple has not, opting instead to go with Intel's Light Peak/Thunderbolt protocol. However, even there, the Mac will support third-party USB 3.0 solutions with appropriate adapters, and it's expected that Thunderbolt will become the next industry standard for both Macs and PCs.

The imponderable, as yet, is whether the hardware commonality tide will turn with greater and greater integration of the Mac and iOS devices, for example the potential of an ARM A6 powered MacBook Air (and eventually other Mac models as well). The irony there for me is that it may make Windows PCs finally look enticing, provided Microsoft can resist jumping into the touchscreen/multitouch/dumbed-down user interface mania with both feet the way Apple appears to be doing.