Historical Reflections The IBM Pc: from Beige Box to Industry standard

Thomas Haigh
The IBM PersonaL Computer was 30 years old last year. The IT world is more interested in the future than the past, so industry pundits used the anniversary primarily to ponder the end of the PC era: the future, they tell us, belongs to phones, tablets, and clouds rather than beige desktop boxes. Yet even if the 400 million or so PCs sold in 2011 were the last ever made it is still clear that no other computer architecture has ever been so important for so long. The PC evolved from a single machine to an industry standard, not just for desktop computers but for notebooks, workstations, and servers. Whether you run Windows, Linux, or even (since 2006) Mac OS you are probably running it on this platform.
But what really do we mean by a “PC” anyway? The Lenovo laptop I used to write this column does not look or act very much like the IBM system I could have received for my ninth birthday, had my parents been able to afford more than the Sinclair ZX81 that actually launched my computing career. And the genuine IBM Portable PC tucked behind my filing cabinet is rarely the machine I reach for first when leaving on a research trip.
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