THE TRUE STORY BEHIND THE IBM PERSONAL COMPUTER
The industry-creating IBM Personal Computer 5150 turns 40 in October. To mark the occasion, Tim Danton reveals the story of its birth – and destroys one long-running myth in the process
N o one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
So begins The War Of The Worlds by HG Wells, and while some IBM executives of the late 1970s may have taken offence at this comparison – the world being watched was the explosive growth of personal computers, the eyes behind the microscope belonging to IBM – there is a ring of truth to this parallel. The main difference was that the template of the PC, as established by IBM, would outlast all of the “transient creatures” other than Apple.
There was one other crucial difference: those creatures knew they were being watched. Everyone in the nascent microcomputer industry knew it was a matter of time before IBM would make the leap from building mainframes and minicomputers to PCs. The only question was when.
One popular story goes that the IBM Personal Computer was kicked into action in mid-1980 when Atari sent a letter to IBM’s then chairman, Frank Cary, suggesting that it could make IBM’s PCs. Rather than fling the invitation into the bin, so the stories go, Cary passed it on to Bill Lowe.
Now dubbed “The father of the IBM PC”, at that time Lowe was IBM’s director of entry systems.
Contemporary accounts suggest this is, at best, a blurring of facts. According to Ray Kassar, then CEO of
Atari, the potential partnership was instigated by Bill Lowe. “We had two meetings actually, one in my office and another at my apartment in San Francisco with IBM,” said Kassar, quoted in the book Atari Inc: Business
is Fun. But the discussions never got far, likely due to Atari’s proprietary design and the fact its computers could only output 40 columns.
In truth, Lowe didn’t need a memo from Atari to tell him that IBM should be building a new computer; it was something he had been convinced of for years. Why had IBM resisted? As Lowe would reflect in 2007 ( pcpro.
link/325lowe), IBM in the late 1970s was in defence mode, “fighting the Justice Department in the US and fighting legal battles overseas” to protect its hardware and software designs and make sure no rival could service its products.
But Lowe wasn’t done yet. In the 1996 documentary Triumph of the
Nerds, he recalled his subsequent conversation with the IBM chairman. “He kind of said well, what should we do, and I said, we think we know what we would like to do if we were going to proceed with our own product. And he said no. At IBM it would take four years and 300 people to do anything, it’s just a fact of life, and I said no sir, we can provide you a product in a year. And he abruptly ended the meeting and said, you’re on, Lowe, come back in two weeks and tell me what you need.”
Birth of the PC
What Lowe needed, it transpired, was a team of 12 young, dedicated engineers who would work flat out for the next year. “We were selected to go work on a top-secret project,” said Patty McHugh, a senior associate engineer on the team who designed the motherboard. “Our mission was to get a product into the market in a year using off-the-shelf components.”
This was a radical departure for IBM. “The key decisions were to go with an open architecture, non-IBM technology, non-IBM software, non-IBM sales, and non-IBM service,” said Lowe, “and we probably spent a full half of the presentation carrying the corporate management committee into this concept because this was a new concept for IBM at the time.”
In particular, the only proprietary chip on the motherboard contained the BIOS (basic input/output system). While that gave IBM some protection against copycats, it was hardly
Fort Knox. Even by 1980 it was well established that other companies could legitimately reverse-engineer a BIOS – crack that and anyone in the world could build a computer that was 100% compatible with any software that ran on the IBM PC. A platform was born.
Famously, the other key decision was to use “non-IBM software”. In August 1980, the month in which the IBM board officially signed off on the project, it was unclear who would be providing this software, but Microsoft was already the frontrunner. Jack Sams was the engineer in charge of software development for the IBM prototype and had plenty of experience working in BASIC: he had spent months wrestling with the language in an attempt to get it working on a minicomputer (the IBM System/23 Datamaster), delaying the project by a year in the process, and had no desire to repeat the same mistakes this time around.
By all reports, Sams liked the cut of young Bill Gates’s jib. And it’s worth emphasising the “young”. While Gates was 24 by this time, he still had the physique and face of an adolescent, meaning Sams initially assumed that Gates was the office boy when they met for the first time. But by the end of their second meeting, he was convinced by the young man’s
Jack Sams initially assumed that Bill Gates was the office boy when they met for the first time