Desktops and Notebooks: The IBM PC Era: Where It All Started

Aug. 12 marked the 30th anniversary of the introduction of IBM's 5150 personal computer. Recently, IBM executive Mark Dean, one of the engineers of the original IBM PC, said the post-PC era is here, and that it's not the devices, but the social interaction they enable, which now is driving innovation. This eWEEK slide show looks at that machine and some of its predecessors. IBM took the features and characteristics of all these early small computers and provided them in one incredibly utilitarian machine. With the PC, the widest possible range of users could perform with a single product all the functions that had until then been optimized in such offerings as the 5100, Displaywriter and 5520. If the IBM PC signaled the dawn of a new era in computing, then its quick ascent to mass acceptance and success had been made possible by those little remembered IBM pioneers that had come before. In an Aug. 10 posting on the IBM Smarter Planet blog, Dean, now the CTO of IBM's Middle East and Africa unit, said he was proud of what IBM accomplished in fueling the PC era, but added that the PC's time as the dominant computing form factor is coming to an end. IBM executives saw it coming when they sold the PC business to Lenovo in 2005, he said.