30 Years ago today: The IBM 5150 PC
Intel D8088 - 1981 Production
Hard to imagine its been 30 years since IBM released the 5150 Personal Computer for the grand sum of $1265 thus starting the flood of PCs. Build with generic hardware, and MS-DOS from Bill Gates and crew (itself only released a month prior), the 5150 did away with proprietary, the MS-DOS OS was not exclusive to IBM, and the hardware was essentially off the shelf, using Intel’s 4.77MHz 8088 (cut down version of the 8086) processor and a discrete 256k of RAM. Other companies, could, and did, in mass, replicate and add to the 5150 making the 8088, and with it the x86 instruction set the de facto standard even to today. (though ARM has been making a large impact as of late due to the rise of mobile computing)
Here is an early add for the 5150, not only have we come a long ways in computers, but advertising as well.
August 11th, 2011 at 10:32 pm
[…] CPU Shack […]
August 14th, 2012 at 6:09 pm
Strange, this ad is for an AT, not the 5150