IBM Celebrates 10th Anniversary of the IBM Personal Computer, a Decade of Industry Leadership

White Plains, N.Y. -- August 12, 1991 -- Ten years ago today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) introduced the IBM Personal Computer, setting a worldwide personal computing standard and establishing a multibillion dollar industry.

In conjunction with the 10th anniversary, IBM announced today it is shipping a 50 MHz upgrade option for its popular Personal System/2 (A) Model 90 and 95 XP 486 computers. With the 50 MHz upgrade option, the new systems perform at more than 50 times the speed of the original IBM PC.

A Look Back

IBM began development of the PC in August 1980 in a small building at its Boca Raton, Fla. site. The original team of a dozen developers, led by Philip D. (Don) Estridge, was given 12 months to complete the project.

The development team needed to break the rules, to go outside the traditional boundaries of product development within IBM, and they did. They went to outside vendors for most of the parts, went to outside software developers for the operating system and application software, and acted as an independent business unit. These changes enabled them to develop and announce the IBM PC in 12 months -- at that time faster than any other hardware product in IBM's history.

The IBM PC was introduced to the world at a press conference in New York City at the Waldorf Astoria ballroom, as well as several other locations around the country. The IBM PC used the Intel (A) 4.77 megahertz (MHz) 8088 microprocessor -- advanced for the time, but slow by today's standards. The diskette drives offered 160 kilobytes (KB) of storage, the equivalent of about 50 single-spaced, typewritten pages. Users could plug the PC into their home television set or choose from an optional monochrome or color display. A typical configuration of 64 KB of memory, a single diskette drive, a color display adapter and IBM Disk Operating System (DOS) was priced at $2,665 (about $3,950 in 1991 dollars.)

Needing new channels to distribute these new computers, IBM turned to Computerland; Sears, Roebuck and Co.; and IBM Product Centers to make the IBM PC available to the broadest possible set of customers.

Beyond the IBM PC

On April 2, 1987, IBM introduced a new family of personal computers, called the Personal System/2. Recognizing the need to offer customers a personal computer with advanced capabilities, IBM introduced Micro Channel (A) architecture, for the first time enabling customers to add new technology to their computer as it is introduced. Previously, new technology often rendered older systems obsolete.

An example of that capability is multimedia -- the combining of text, graphics, audio and video. Today, a user can take a PS/2 (A) purchased in 1987, install new multimedia adapter cards, and run multimedia applications, including video, music and sounds from compact disks, laser disks and rewritable optical disks.

With multimedia technology, students in the classroom can go beyond the textbook as a source for learning. When studying about the effects of the environment on a rare species of tiger, for example, at the touch of a button students can see the tiger in full motion running through its natural habitat; at the touch of another button, they can hear the tiger's roar. Multimedia technology will have a significant positive impact on the way students learn today and in the future.

Perhaps the most widespread impact of the personal computer is in the workplace. Retyping an entire report to make one small change or calculating a financial report by hand are problems of the past.

But the personal computer has meant far more than productivity in the office. It is helping to resolve social issues. For example, IBM has been working extensively with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Federal Bureau of Investigation on a program developed by IBM and QMA Corporation of Reston, Va.

Running on a PS/2, the program uses pictures of children who have been missing for a long time and creates a computer-generated image showing what the children would look like now. The program has already assisted in locating several missing children.

Personal computers also are helping the physically challenged. Individuals who are nearly blind now can use products to enlarge the print on the display. Others who have limited or no use of their arms can replace the standard computer keyboard with a variety of products to enter information, including an earpiece that aims a beam of light at a simulated keyboard.

A Look into the Future

The next decade of personal computing will bring even more rapid change and advancement. In the next few years, voice recognition technology will enable users to speak into a microphone and tell the computer what to do. Using verbal commands, individuals will be able to "type" documents by speaking into the microphone.

Soon, doctors in the midst of a surgical procedure will be able to speak to a PS/2 right in the operating room and call up from the hospital database a specific x-ray from the patient's file and display it on a screen, without the surgeon having to touch anything and contaminate the sterile environment. IBM recently demonstrated this technology to surgeons at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., providing them with a glimpse into the future of personal computing in the medical field.

In the coming decade, pen-based and wireless computing devices will bring computing to an entirely new class of user -- the mobile worker. The mobile worker is someone who does most work standing up or moving around, such as car insurance adjusters or repairmen or someone who meets with clients face-to-face: architects, lawyers, reporters, and so on.

Pen-based computers will need to be able to function indoors and out, be lightweight and rugged, having no moving parts such as spinning disk drives that could be damaged if the system is dropped when moving about.

Pen-based computing will also move to the desktop, but will differ significantly from mobile computing, acting as a replacement for a mouse (a device used to point to a spot on the display) and an adjunct to the keyboard. It will require the capabilities of an advanced operating system, allowing the user to run many applications at once.

Another application for personal computers in the future will be video conferencing on the desktop. Rather than spending time traveling from one internal meeting to another, personal computer users will have the ability to click a button on their mouse, open a "window" on their screen and have a video conference right at their desk using ordinary telephone lines. Across the world or across the hall, users will be able to use video conferencing right in their office, saving both time and money.

IBM and PictureTel Corporation of Peabody, Mass., have demonstrated the ability to bring video conferencing to the desktop using a small camera and microphone device attached to a PC display. IBM recently demonstrated this capability at PC Expo in New York City allowing visitors to ask questions at IBM's information booth to IBM experts located elsewhere in the facility.

The introduction of the IBM Personal Computer helped foster a multibillion dollar industry and set standards that helped establish the PC industry. IBM will continue to lead the way into the next era in personal computing.

Continuing the Momentum

Ten years after introducing its first personal computer, IBM today began shipping the 50 MHz Upgrade Option for IBM's top-selling PS/2 Models 90 and 95 XP 486, allowing customers to easily upgrade their existing 486-based PS/2s to the latest Intel technology.

Customers in 1981 were impressed by the original PC's 4.77 MHz 8088 microprocessor, its 16 KB of memory and 160 KB of floppy diskette storage. Today, systems configured with the new 50 MHz card benchmark at over 50 times the performance of the original PC, offering over 1000 times the memory capacity (64 MB) and 10,000 times the storage of the original PC (1.6 billion bytes or 1.6 gigabytes).

The new card features an Intel 50 MHz microprocessor, which includes an internal memory cache controller, an 8 KB memory cache and an integrated floating-point processor. The processor complex also includes a 256 KB memory cache for even greater processor performance.

Available immediately, the PS/2 Processor Upgrade Option is priced at $3,695 for customers to upgrade from 33 MHz systems, $5,345 for 25 MHz systems and $7,245 for 486 SX 20 MHz systems.

Personal System/2, PS/2 and Micro Channel are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation.

Intel is trademark of Intel Corporation.

CONTACT: W. Dean Kline of IBM, 914-642-5408