Adverts featuring the IBM 5150

It was years off from being the first, and it was boring in its specification, but no model of microcomputer did more to define the industry than IBM's 5150: the IBM PC.

IBM didn't take it particularly seriously at first, choosing to run it as a "skunk-works" project at its Small Systems Division in Boca Raton, Florida, and viewing it more as a neverssary evil to prevent new-fangled micros from other companies eating its lunch.

Cobbled together quickly from off-the-shelf parts, the 5150 was launched in 1981 to somewhat underwhelming reviews. Although it was nominally a 16-bit machine, it used Intel's 8088 CPU which only had an 8-bit data bus, meaning that its performance was not much better than some of the 8-bit machines still on the market.

Its memory of 64K wasn't exactly groundbreaking either, and the early models were also floppy-disk only.

However, the one thing it had on its side was the name. IBM was solid, dependable, and had been around since the Stone Age, and so the 5150 offered something that hadn't really been available before in a micro: consistency and a definite future. Businesses could invest in it without worrying about it becoming obsolete the following week.

It was this, more than anything, that sealed its success, but it was the clones - thanks to the 5150's off-the-shelf design and the ease of copying it - that established the industry and set the PC as the standard for decades.