The PC met 35 years between us – Union of Morelos

Everyone, even Apple fans, we had to use a PC once in life.

ago 35 years, IBM launched its first Personal Computer, popularly known as PC, looking to compete with the successful Apple II, which was nearly four in stores and was dominating without competition the nascent computing market for home and office.

despite being the company’s most important computing, IBM was not convinced to enter the market of personal computers until the end of 1979, seeing the good reception was having the Apple computer.

IBM realized that personal computers had great potential, so he entrusted the task of preparing the PC to Don Estridge and William C. Lowe, two of its most important engineers of IBM Entry Systems division. In little over a year Estridge and Lowe (and a team of 10 people plus) and had completed the model 5150

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the now legendary 5150 model went on sale at $ 1,600 and included a monochrome monitor greenish tones, a keyboard, a central unit, printer and external floppy disk drive. Had 16 KB of RAM, expandable via external chips, and worked with a processor with a speed of 4.77 MHz. Not included hard drive, but you could attach an external component of up to 10 MB.

But to transfer it quickly to the sale IBM had to sign two agreements, the first with Intel, which provided its processor 8088, and another with the young company Microsoft, which licensed its operating system. Neither of the two agreements was exclusive, which was a serious error.

So with the finished equipment, was launched with great fanfare on August 12, 1981 at a major event at the Waldorf hotel Astoria New York, something never seen before to launch a computer. A couple of weeks later, Apple released a huge announcement of a full-page in the influential newspaper The Wall Street Journal where, with a mixture of courtesy and arrogance, congratulated IBM by joining the market of personal computing.

 

“Welcome IBM, really. Welcome to the most exciting and important since the computer revolution began 35 years ago “market, said the beginning of the message.

 

IBM launched an aggressive campaign, especially focusing to publicize your product among small and medium enterprises and selling PCs at a price below Apple computers.

Initially IBM had set a goal of sell 241,000 PCs in the next five years, but the success of their product was unprecedented, making selling that figure compares month, far exceeding all sales expectations they had.

Although IBM democratized the use of pCs, and virtually all current computers (except for Macs) are direct descendants of the PC 5150, which benefited from the boom in computing was Microsoft, which propelled the clones of the PC, which they appropriated the bulk of the market during the second half of the eighties thanks to even lower prices.

IBM set a standard manufacturing for other companies, but had to sell all its personal computer division in 2004 to the Chinese company Lenovo, and is currently focused as before the release of the PC, in large companies. | spaghetti code