Happy Anniversary, IBM PC!

Today is the 25th anniversary of the introduction of the IBM PC.

I bought my first personal computer, an IBM PC, back in 1983 for $5,000 (Canadian). That’s 5,000 1983 dollars!!

It only had 128KB of RAM and a 5.25” floppy drive. It didn’t have a hard drive (I later added a 10MB hard drive). It had a 4.77MHz Intel 8088 processor. It had no graphics. It ran PC-DOS 1.0 (a rebranded MS-DOS).


Twenty three years later, I’ll be getting an Apple Mac Pro, with two 2.66GHz dual-core Xeon processors, 2GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, SuperDrive DVD writer, NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT graphics, and a 23” Cinema HD Display for about 5,000 (2006) dollars! It includes the world’s very best desktop Operating System, OS X! And it’s a techno-wonder work of art!

(Here are other examples of techno-wonder works of art:

http://www.americansound.com/Oracle.htm

http://www.bwspeakers.com/

http://www.rsportscars.com/eng/cars/ferrari_f430.asp

)


It’s funny to celebrate the 25th anniversary by totally abandoning Microsoft. Just as the IBM PC was the state-of-the-art leader in 1981, so is the Apple Mac Pro in 2006.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the IBM PC. It revolutionized the world and utterly changed our lives forever. It is fitting that something equally majestic should follow in its footsteps on this, the 25th anniversary...