HISTORY OF THE PC

In a world of competing processors and operating systems, John Knight explores how the PC began, what powers it and how it’s still going.

- John Knight

The PC; the personal computer; the IBM-compatible. Whatever you want to call it, somehow it has maintained a dominant presence for nearly four decades.

If you try to launch any program written from the ’80s to the 2000s onwards, you have a good chance of getting it to launch: your PC has backward compatibility going right back to the ’70s, enabling you to run pieces of history as though they were from yesterday. In fact, your computer is brimming with heritage, from the way your motherboard is laid out to the size of your drive bays to the layout of your keyboard.

Flip through any PC magazine and you’ll see everything from bulky desktop computers to sleek business laptops; from expensive file servers to single-board devices only a few inches big. Somehow, all these machines are part of the same PC family, and somehow they can all talk to each other.

But where did all of this start? That’s what we’ll be examining: from the development of the PC to its launch in the early ’80s, as it fought off giants such as Apple, as it was cloned by countless manufacturers, and as it eventually went 32-bit. We’ll look at the ’90s and the start of the multimedia age, the war between the chip makers, and the establishment of Windows as the world’s leading but not best operating system.

But before we go anywhere, to understand the revolutionary nature of the PC you first need to grasp what IBM was at the time and the culture that surrounded it.