The History Of The PC

In a world of competing processors and operating systems, John Knight explores how the PC began

- John Knight

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

If you try to launch a program from the ’80s to the 2000s, 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.

Despite the weight of all of this lineage, we have an extraordinary range of devices that somehow get lumped under the category “PC.” Go back to the early ’80s, and “PC” would evoke a desktop box from the business colossus IBM, but now the name doesn’t belong to anyone, it still survives as “the PC.”

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 operating system. Lastly, we’ll examine the new millennium, initially dominated by Microsoft and the PC, followed by a slow shift to where we are now.