From PC World: The IBM Personal Computer's 25th Anniversary. In 1981, IBM's 5150 took the business world by storm and moved the PC into the mainstream.
I recall seeing my first personal computers in 1974: Commadore's PET and the TRS-100 from Radio Shack. (PET was for for personal electronic transactor, I think, while TRS was short for Tandy Radio Shack, but was jargoned to be short for "TRaSh.") The PET was more expensive, but included the monitor; the TRS did not. I think they were priced around $400 at a time when scientific calculators were around $150.
The only person I knew at the time with a personal computer was a computer geek friend. His computer was of a different brand -- started with an A, perhaps? Mass storage was a cassette recorder, and it took forever to load a game from the casette tape onto the memory. It was primarily used to play space blasters. In my university years (1974-1981), it was more useful (and profitable) for me to buy a decent electric typewriter than a PC. In the meantime, the mainframe computers at UBC were our main contact wtih computers.
When IBM released the PC, the personal computer was suddenly taken seriously. (PC was the brand name, short for Personal Computer.) Problem was, the PC was hugely overpriced and under-featured -- priced for corporations, not for personal use. Hence many PC clones rose up; their problem was that they were only partially compatible, such as the Victor 9000 that was my first computer. I bought it in April 1983 for $4,500 (plus $750 for a dot matrix printer).
Compaq changed everything when it (1) cloned the IBM BIOS legally and (2) came out with a transportable computer (size of a portable sewing machine). The company grew from $0 to $111 million in sales in one year.
Still, IBM set the standard for PCs, which continue to be employed to this day: VGA graphics, the keyboard layout, the BIOS, etc.
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