The Development of the Personal Computer

In 1952, a major computing company took a decision to get out of the business of making mainframe computers. They believed that there was only a market for four mainframes in the whole world. That company was IBM. The following year they reversed their decision.

In 1980, IBM decided that there was market for 250,000 PCs, so they set up a special team to develop the first IBM PC. It went on sale in 1981 and set a world-wide standard for IBM- compatibility which, over the next ten years, was only seriously challenged by another company, Apple Computers. Since then, over seventy million PCs made by IBM and other manufactures have been sold. Over this period, PCs have become commodity items.

The history of the multi-billion dollar PC industry has been one of mistakes. Xerox Corporation funded the initial research on personal computers in their Palo Alto laboratory in California. However, the company failed to capitalize on this work, and the ideas that they put together went into the operating system developed for Apple’s computers. This was a graphical interface: using a mouse, the user clicks on icons which represent the function to be performed.

The first IBM PC was developed using existing available electrical components. With IBM’s badge on the box it became the standard machine for large corporations to purchase. When IBM were looking for an operating system, they went initially to Digital Research, who were market leaders in command-based operating systems (these are operating systems in which the users type in commands to perform a function). When the collaboration between IBM and Digital Research failed, IBM turned to Bill Gates, then 25 years old, to write their operating system.

Bill Gates founded Microsoft on the basis of the development of MS/DOS, the initial operating system for the IBM PC. Digital Research have continued to develop their operating system, DR/DOS, and it is considered by many people to be a better product than Microsoft’s. However, without an endorsement from IBM, it has become a minor player in the market.