At the time the original 5150 was released, there were already other 8088 and 8086 systems on the market. And it didn’t really strain the envelope-- no IBM-exclusive chips, and the whole 8-bit bus and support chips angle.
It undoubtedly succeeded in large part because it was a “known quantity” for commercial customers-- an approved vendor, known support and warranty policies, too big to fail. I know even as late as the mid-80s, Commodore was still advertising “You’re paying $$$ more (for a PCjr instead of a 64) because the box says IBM on it”
But I was curious if there was anything that it also offered that was uniquely compelling in the at the moment of launch.
There are a few things I can think of, but I’m a little skeptical of most of them:
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The monochrome display (5151) was very well-regarded; 80x25 of very legible text and a nice long-persistence phosphor. I had one for a while in the 90s and it was quite good even though the geometry was shot. But was it much better than other “professional” machines, particularly ones using dedicated terminals or custom monitors which might also offer better tubes/drive circuitry than a repurposed home TV?
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Offering it as a turnkey package-- there were 8086 S-100 or similar setups far more robust than any 5150, but you were typically assembling it yourself, or relying on a much smaller vendor (i. e. Cromemco) to build a package deal.
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The overall ergonomic package-- I feel like there weren’t too many pre-1981 machines that match the overall layout of “modest size, all-inclusive desktop box you can use as a monitor riser, and quality detachable keyboard” A backplane box and seperate drive enclosures would start to get bulky, and keyboard-is-the-case seemed to become a signature of low-end home computers.
If you walked into a brand-neutral shop in late 1981, what was the unique selling proposition for the IBM PC? The Apple II was biggest software/installed base, the Atari 800 had the best graphics, CP/M machines had established business software already.
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Only “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”, I think.
The thing that made the platform huge imo was when Compaq developed a 100% IBM PC compatible and started that market. The IBM PC wasn’t going to be huge on its own, too expensive and too little going on.
The IBM name, build quality, warranty and whole nobody-got-fired-buying-IBM helped, but don’t undersell 80 column text mode: if you wanted to do Real Business Stuff, 40 column just didn’t cut it, which wrote off a LOT of the cheaper competition. CP/M machines could be 80 column, but they also weren’t required to as there was no default terminal expectation. You’d end up with close-but-not-quites pretty often, even on the upper-end of the price scale.
And yes, the Apple II had 80 column mode, but again, it wasn’t exactly the cheaper option.
IBM entered the market at exactly the right time, with the right machine, with the right features, at a price that wasn’t incredibly outside of reality and sold an awful lot of them.
That reminds me of an old joke:
The three biggest lies:
- “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.”
- “Of course, I’ll respect you in the morning.”
- “This machine is 100% IBM compatible.”
One thing that I remember on clones was a timing switch. The IBM PC was slower than the clones, and games often didn’t run as expected unless you slowed down the processor.
The Apple II was biggest software/installed base, the Atari 800 had the best graphics, CP/M machines had established business software already.
My impressions: Apple II and Commodore weren’t really after the business market. CP/M machines were although I only knew of one guy that owned one (and he ran a BBS of all things from it). Those interested in Apple or Commodore and Atari were probably not trying to run a business of a lot of size. Don’t forget the Tandy TRS-80 stuff too.
“Turbo switch”: a triumph of marketing for a “slow down” control.
I think you head the nail on the head when you said there were no IBM-exclusive chips. I think the openness of the system followed by the proliferation of clones drew a ton of companies and developers to the platform.
The IBM also looked like a business machine whereas others felt cheap. It may not have looked like much on first glance but they struck a good midpoint between the C64/Apple etc and the business-oriented minicomputers on the higher end of the scale.
I think the success of the 5150 was less about what it did and more about what it was and what that represented, particularly to businesses
I think in particular the part about feeling cheap is relevant. Today the plastic shell of the 64 is charming. But back in the day, that was up against the massive metal case of the IBM systems – still legendary for weight and overall build.
In addition to the other comments let’s not forget that IBM made the absolute best keyboards. That was not just a good thing - if you were going to replace an IBM Selectric typewriter in an office it was a requirement.
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I remember the PC/XT was a beast. It was a microcomputer that came with a hard drive standard, could support up to 640kB of RAM, and with the CGA option, it could display crisp 16-color 80-column text—none of that blurry, illegible component video that the competition used.
You certainly paid for the privilege, though. It cost $7545 for the base model, equivalent to $23039 in 2023, mainly because of the aforementioned hard drive.
Thankfully they’re not so expensive any more, because the introduction of the hard drive was crucial for making multitasking operating systems like Windows possible. Before hard drives, in order to switch applications, you also had to insert the floppy disk containing the application, and once it’s running, insert another floppy disk containing whatever files you use with it (documents, saved games, etc). How do you multitask when each task’s files are on a different disk and only one disk can be in the drive at a time? But with a hard drive, all applications and other files are on the same giant disk, and can be accessed whenever the user or an application wants to, without switching disks.
