PC Nostalgia

The PC, at least the IBM-style PC, not the MITS, Altair, Ohio Scientific, Polymorphic Systems, North Star, style.. was introduced on August 12, 1981. Wow.. who would have thunk it.

Before we lose some of the "old" referential information... here is a piece I wrote for PC Magazine on the 15th anniversary of the IBM PC in 1997. The entire long piece is HERE.

This was my part of it:

Frank J. Derfler, Jr. Remembers
It was either brilliance or incompetence that caused IBM's PC design team to leave the system so incomplete yet so open for third-party developers. I vote for brilliance. You could argue that the incompleteness of the early PC was a marketing necessity because few buyers could afford a fully capable system in one bite.

As a result, PC Magazine's readers spent much of the early eighties adding multifunction boards, graphics adapters, and hard disks to their PCs. The September 1982 PC Magazine listed 282 hardware products that could be installed inside the IBM PC, at that point just one year old. Tecmar offered a 5MB hard disk kit for $2,995. Quadram's Quadboard, which added the clock, serial and parallel ports, and memory IBM left out, was $595 with 64K of memory.

With all of that money at stake, objective comparative evaluations were already important to our readers. As PC Magazine's data communications editor, one of the first products I examined was the AST Combo Card, which included networking in the form of Corvus Systems' Omninet. The price was more than $1,000--plus the RAM chips.

In my day job, I was working on the acquisition of PCs for the entire U.S. Air Force. We estimated we'd end up buying 5,000 PCs, but that one contract ran to over 140,000 systems in two years.

Perhaps at PC Magazine we're still better off drilling down into product details than predicting the future. Above all, we're good at sticking to what we do best.