Pre-release press reports on the IBM PC

This article is about an event that took place on June 8, 1981.

IBM managed to keep their big entrance into the home computer market out of public rumours for an impressively long time. The first press mention that I could find of what would ultimately become the IBM Model 5150 Personal Computer is in the June 8, 1981 issue of the bi-weekly InfoWorld magazine¹ (thank you to Jimmy Maher for referencing it²), little more than two months before the official announcement on August 12. That’s even more surprising considering how many other companies IBM partnered with to put the machine together. Those non-disclosure agreements, which famously caused headaches for some companies, such as Digital Research, apparently worked pretty well.

InfoWorld’s “reliable internal source” at IBM supplied them with plenty of precise technical details about the upcoming machine. The specifications were compelling, but not breathtaking for the time – regardless of the machine itself, the much bigger story was IBM’s anticipated entry into the home computing market, up to that point dominated by Apple, Commodore, and Tandy. IBM was an entirely different beast, employing more than 350,000 people and reporting a revenue exceeding 29 billion dollars in 1981³. There was a mixture of emotions between excitement about the air of legitimacy this would give the field, and dread at what such an economical force might do to the rest of the young industry. A good indication for this apprehension is how InfoWorld titled their scoop: “IBM to Pounce on Micro Market”. Not words that show uncertainty about whether it was going to make an impact.

At this point, IBM was still trying to keep things under wraps. InfoWorld hit a brick wall when trying to get more out of IBM through official channels. One IBM contact’s response:

To my knowledge we’re not introducing any such product. Furthermore, we don’t comment on speculation.

InfoWorld was unimpressed, and sardonically concluded the article:

InfoWorld will have a full report on this bit of “speculation” after its introduction in New York in July.

Another pre-announcement article appeared as an editorial in the July 1981 issue of BYTE⁴. Editor in Chief Chris Morgan put the looming release in perspective by focussing explicitly on the wider impact he expected the IBM PC to have on the “history of personal computing”. Amidst rumours of other major corporations, such as DEC and GE, eyeing the growing market, according to Morgan there was “no contest”. It’s really all about IBM. Perhaps there are no better words than Morgan’s to help us understand the significance experts of the field attributed to what was about to happen:

IBM’s new personal computer […] is far and away the media star, not because of its features, but because it exists at all.

Home computers weren’t new, they had been affordable and accessible to a wider customer base for many years. However, they were still predominantly the domain of hackers and tinkerers, supplied and moved forward by many upstart companies, often themselves founded and run by hackers and tinkerers, with few experienced businesspeople between them. On the other hand, electronic computing had well permeated the office, but those machines were generally expensive, bulkier equipment supplied by “serious” companies – such as IBM. What was coming up on the horizon was a melding of those two worlds. Computers built by the same company which dominated the mainframe business, with its million dollar machines that its main users often didn’t even get to see in person, were about to be available to small businesses, classrooms, and homes. According to Morgan:

The influence of a personal computer made by a company whose name has literally come to mean “computer” to most of the world is hard to contemplate.

In the article, we also find mention of the operating system IBM would offer to anyone choosing to get diskette drives with their PC – IBM Personal Computer DOS – although the fact that it was supplied by a programming language tool provider named Microsoft did not seem to have leaked yet. It’s PC-DOS that will be my next focus, because its prompt was where the journey of a lot of fresh IBM PC owners started.

Sources: Wikipedia, The Digital Antiquarian, IBM Archives