Anniversaries are useful occasions. Aside from the opportunity to give and/or receive nifty gifts, they also provide markers for events, allowing us to reflect on changes that have occurred over a given number of years.
Take, for example, August 12, 1981. That would be 40 years, more or less, depending upon when you are reading this. What could possibly happen in 40 years? An Asian elephant lives about that long, so 40 years is the end of the line for it. On the other hand, Galapagos tortoises are barely out of their childhood, with another century or more ahead of them. An olive tree is just two or three inches in diameter, but it can look forward to upward of 2,000 years of additional growth. An Italian at age 40 is well below the median (46.2). At 40, a car is just starting to be considered “classic” and not more “used”.
And a personal computer would be a museum piece.
On August 12, 1981, IBM announced its newest computer: The 5150 Personal Computer. It was the first desktop computer in the world.
The computer was designed to meet the needs of small companies and the occasional individual who was enough of a geek to want one (even though “geek” didn’t come into common use to describe computer rats until a couple of years after the 5150 was released). It had an Intel 8088 (8 -16 bit) processor and 16K RAM, expandable to 256K. Built-in ROM memory was 40 K, but there were five expansion slots for additional memory.
A jack to attach a cassette tape drive was standard, but up to two integral disk drives could be added. These were, of course, for 5 1/4-inch single-side 160 KB floppy disks. The operating system was PC-DOS vi. o, made by this little company called Microsoft. The weight of the computer was pretty hefty: 21 pounds for the basic configuration, with an additional three pounds each if the customer chose to add the disk drives.