Saturday, August 12, 2006

Happy 25th IBM PC


August 12 is the 25th anniversary of the IBM personal computer launch, a pairing of MS and DOS, Microsoft and the disk operating system.

I still have my 1984 IBM XT, which looks very much like the model above. It is intact, with the original hard drive, green screen monitor and keyboard. In fact, I still have a current spare PC that has a floppy drive in it so that I can still interact and retrieve files from it. I last used the IBM in the mid-1990's, and it still has Word Perfect 5.1 on it as it was a work computer. I purchased my first personal computer using Windows in October 1996. I was so dumb back then, when someone asked me what was on my desktop, I told them my computer was not on my desk (or desktop) but on my kitchen table. To this day, that person still laughs at me when he remembers my naive response.

2 comments:

Bob said...

In the early 90s, I was given an 80s computer that I never used. I had a Smith Corona word processing typewriter with "Data Disks" & that was fine for a writer when you had to present everything on hard copy. In fact, that old Smith Corona changed how I write the same way a computer would, since I could open a file, edit on the machine, & save the file.

Carrie said...

But, do you still have it????