First impressions of the first PC

Personal Computer World was my baby from the summer of 1979 to the autumn of 1981. I nursed it from near-death to become a robust infant during the years when desktop machines were generally called microcomputers.

Then I handed the editorship to Peter Rodwell, and guess what my first freelance writing job was? It was to review the IBM PC and meet some of the development team in Boca Raton, Florida.

For the first time, Personal Computer World was going to review a machine actually called a personal computer. How weird is that? At least it validated Angelo Zgorelec’s choice of title when he founded the magazine in 1978.

Time was short and I didn’t have the usual luxury of taking the machine home with me. I had to beg and plead with IBM for every millisecond I spent with it. My aim was to maximise hands-on time and minimise attempts to influence me. We were paranoid about IBM in those days.

In the event, the Boca Raton team were nothing like any IBMers I’d ever met. The machine had been announced the previous working day and caused quite a stir. So they were distracted, but otherwise they were fine.

There was absolutely no chance of me taking the PC to bits and reassembling it (my usual first steps). I just had to work with it where it sat, poking around as best I could whenever my minders were out of sight.

It was good to meet Don Estridge and some of his ‘skunk works’ team, who had put the machine together. His real name was Philip and, sadly, he was killed in a plane crash in Texas in 1985. Little did he and his team know what an impact they would have on the microcomputer world. Or maybe they did; perhaps it was just Big Blue (IBM’s nickname) that was surprised by what happened.

I remember looking for the CP/M operating system, which most desktop computers had used up until then. But the IBM was running something very similar called PC-Dos. I didn’t know at the time, but this was created by Seattle Computer Products as QDos – Quick and Dirty Operating System. As far as I was concerned, Microsoft’s Bill Gates had negotiated a nice deal with IBM to provide the operating system to users at $60 a throw, and goodness knows what margin to his own company.

Gary Kildall, the man behind CP/M, had belatedly persuaded IBM to offer CP/M-86 as an option at some horrible multiple of the PC-Dos price. I thought it was $180, but Wikipedia tells me it was $240. So that was the end of Kildall’s dominance. Amstrad later gave CP/M a brief new lease of life with its PCW machines – what is it about the title of this magazine that makes people want to name their computers after it?

The IBM PC looked very corporate, very IBM-ish and very boring. But, from the point of view of the potential customers, it was reassuring. After all, it had an IBM badge on it, even if it was largely made from standard components. IT departments were still sniffy about such toy computers, but middle management took to them in their droves, especially when the Lotus 123 spreadsheet arrived.

I just went into my garage to rummage for the notes I took for my review, but I reckon I must have put them somewhere safe after the last time someone asked me about the birth of the PC. All I have left is my memory.

I remember being impressed that Peach Tree Software had written some business applications to run on the machine. Looking back, I shouldn’t have been that impressed. A machine without applications is no use to a business user. The slots for the plug-in cards seemed to have lifted a good idea from Apple, but I’m not sure I fully understood the implications in terms of the third-party industries that this would create.

Estridge’s team was not only smart, it was prepared to run against the grain of IBM’s proprietorial instincts. Anyone was able to add hardware and software to the platform as long as it conformed to IBM’s standards.

Of course, Gates was even smarter because he made sure he could license his own version of the OS to the clones that came along later. Needless to say, I foresaw none of this. Nor, I suspect, did IBM.

All it took was for some smart engineers to replicate the functionality of the Bios and the clone business took off.

But that was all for the future. Leaving Boca Raton, I was pleased that IBM, which until then had restricted itself to big corporate computers, had joined ‘the rest of us’ at the desktop.

On the other hand, I was disappointed at the drabness of the machine. And, it has to be said, its limited functionality. I had already been using an Intertec Superbrain, with a twin floppy drive, as my own perfectly satisfactory workhorse for a while. The big differences with the IBM were its badge, the 16-bit processor, the open architecture and PC-Dos.

In the light of history, this simple formula was enough to eventually bury all of its then competitors, apart from those who managed to migrate to the clone business.

See here for original review and here for PC birthday roundup

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