Sure, the first real PC was the Altair 8800. A DIY-kit dating back to 1975. Which was quickly followed by the Apple I and II, the Commodore 64 and the Tandy TRS-80. Not wanting to stay behind IBM wanted their own product. After all, they had missed the importance of wordprocessors and were rapidly loosing marketshare.

Little did they know they were suddenly part of the business again. In less than one year IBM produced their own version of a personal computer. Wanting to be this quick, they had to include other firms hard- and software : Intel's processor and Microsoft's MS-DOS. And thus creating the famous Wintel combo ...

In time this threesome became the basis for the IBM compatible computers we now all know and use. Think IBM, think Compaq, think Dell, think Toshiba, think Gateway, think whatever clone you have built yourself buying seperate parts ... Whether you use Windows, Linux, some Unix flavors or the (almost) late BeOS, you're doing it on an IBM compatible ... Okay, give or take a few Macintoshers who still believe Jobs wrote the first GUI interface controllable by mouse. As a matter of fact, a few months earlier (the 27th of April 1981), Xerox unveiled the 8010 Star Information System, whose interface had windows, pull-down menus and icons. Furthermore it included built-in Ethernet networking and a laser printer. And everything was controllable by a mouse. The Star sold poorly, but it foreshadowed the future of computing. And that ladies and gentlemen, was the first real window-computer. Not an Apple ...

The specs of that first IBM PC weren't all that great if you compare oit to what we have these days, but I can still remember the first PC I used and by Jove (British English) and by God (American English) ... the thing had almost the same specifications. The IBM 5150, had an Intel 8088 processor (a lightning 4,77 MHz speed), a whopping 64 KB amount of RAM, one or two Tandon 5,25 inch diskdrives (160 KB capacity), and a monochrome or color videocard. Pong anyone ?

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