@kork75 19 October 2020 more from that month

Portable Personal Computer

One of the many merits acknowledged to the “Big Blue” (International Business Machines Corporation) is that it invented the definition of PC: “The Personal Computer”. A marketing gimmick probably by an unknown copywriter. Because the computer that came out of the IBM factory on 12 August 1981 was a revolutionary machine, but it was by no means the first "personal computer". To the IBM industry, thanks to its extraordinary ability to condition the global market in those years, we must acknowledge the undoubted merit of having given a decisive impulse to the diffusion of an instrument that was then more esoteric than exotic.

https://pixabay.com/it/vectors/portatile-gadget-portable-computer-35570/ When 5155 (this is the official abbreviation) came out of the factory, the era of the “personal computer” began; this was a very modest machine if compared to today's standards, and extremely expensive compared to these same standards. The processor was an Intel (capable of working at 4.77 MHz.), the same manufacturer that now supplies processors to almost 80 per cent of the world's personal computers. IBM "personal computers" sold more than half a million of them in just one year, five times more than initially forecast, but most of them ended up on the desks of corporate employees and not in people's homes. The idea of "personal" was more related to its size and relative ease of use. The first PC of "Big Blue" cost about two thousand dollars. But the American weekly magazine "Time", that year had understood the scope of the novelty and its disruptive capacity for innovation, had dedicated the cover it usually reserves to the "Man of the Year" to 5155. The IBM computer was by no means the first desktop computer or for personal use; before him, there were several attempts, more or less rudimentary, but they were essential and primitive machines.

The first real personal computer was built in Cupertino, California, by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. It was called Apple II (the Apple I was little more than a prototype) and arrived on the market in 1977. It's no coincidence that, at the end of its press releases, Apple reports this sentence: "Apple started the personal computer revolution in the 70s with the Apple II and continued on this path reinventing the personal computer in the 80s with the Macintosh". The Apple II was also the most long-lived computer ever built in the world. It only went out of production, after endless modifications and improvements, in 1993, sixteen years after the first model. Compared to the first IBM, the Apple II had cutting-edge features, such as the ability to handle graphics, even in colour. Despite IBM's impact and enormous financial strength, Apple will remain the most innovative company in the industry for many years to come. It will always be Apple that in 1992 with Lisa will bring to the public the concept of the graphic interface (created years earlier in Xerox's Stanford laboratories, but remained experimental), which became popular two years later thanks to the Macintosh revolution. So, even if it is right to remember the 5155 “personal computer” if only for its symbolic value, the revolution in the personal computer industry was made by Apple, which had proposed certainly more original and innovative solutions, such as its “operating system”. The software, which is the brain and the heart of the computer, is what makes it work and makes all the other programs we install there work. Because IBM had, yes, built the machine, but the software that made it work "Big Blue" took it from a company then completely unknown: Bill Gates' Microsoft. It was MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System). It was a minimalist system, where the commands were not iconic and symbolic as in the computers we know today and of which the Macintosh was the absolute and recognised progenitor, but had to be handwritten using often obscure terms (DOS). The graphic interface for IBM-compatible computers did not arrive until November 1985, more than four years after the so-called "first" pc and two years later than its announcement. At a famous press conference in New York, Bill Gates nodded his Windows operating system, which came out of Microsoft's laboratories. And Windows was also a resounding success. **By Kork75!**