Dear PC: Happy 30th birthday

London: Thirty years ago, yesterday, the machine that would revolutionise the world was revealed to the world in a ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria, New York. The IBM 5150 was to change the world of computing in ways that even its designers couldn’t have imagined. There were, of course, computers before the IBM 5150, such as the Apple II, various models of Atari, and the Commodore PET. Called ‘microcomputers’, these machines were small and relatively affordable compared to the other type of computer prevalent at the time, the mainframe, for which you’d need a bigger house and an even bigger budget. IBM made mainframes, so to distinguish the new 5150 from those machines, IBM called it a ‘personal computer’.But the IBM 5150 had more to it than just a bit of sticky branding. Its killer innovation was to use only off-the-shelf parts. Writes Jay Green: Nervous, particularly about the advance that the Apple II was making in computing, IBM raced to come up with an alternative. With time pressure, IBM chose to build its new machine from non-IBM components, a foreign concept for the insular company. That enabled the team to develop the product in 12 months, faster than any other product in IBM’s history at that time. This new paradigm of building computers from what was available, rather than creating a bespoke machine from scratch, extended to the software too. After failing to come to a licensing agreement with Digital Research Inc. for the use of the then popular CP/M , IBM turned to a fresh-faced new start-up, Microsoft, and used PC-DOS instead. [caption id=“attachment_61344” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Bill Gates and Andy Grove on IBM 5150’s 20th birthday. Reuters”] [/caption] But what IBM could do, so could anyone else. Within a couple of years, IBM clones were everywhere : In the early 1980s, thousands of clone PC manufacturers rushed to follow IBM’s lead, and many took the view that what buyers wanted was something that would run the same DOS software, only cheaper. And it’s hard to argue with that. It certainly helped companies such as Alan Michael Sugar Trading, ie Amstrad, to make a few bob. My own introduction to computing came aged nine when my dad bought a Sinclair ZX80 , a tiny little thing that plugged into our TV and ran programmes off a cassette tape player. Through the ZX81 , Spectrum and then, in 1986, on to an Amstrad PC1512 , an IBM clone and the first of many to grace our family’s desks. It was on Sinclair’s machines that I learnt to programme in BASIC, a skill I wish I had continued to develop. But when it came to learning about hardware, it was an endless stream of IBM clones that taught me how to put a desktop computer together. By my mid-20s I had the budget to buy my own computer and was soon learning how to do my own upgrades. Nothing was as nerve-wracking as taking apart a machine, having all the bits spread out before me on the carpet as I stood wondering whether or not I had what it takes to put it all back together again and still have a working computer. I will confess that, on more than one occasion, I made panicked phones call to my father as I sat, machine non-operational before me, with only some blinking lights to help me diagnose the problem. About five years ago, I switched to Mac when a friend of mine offered me an old PowerBook G4, affectionately known as the TiBook . Amazingly, although it has some dead pixels on its screen, it still works. Since, then, my household has been a multi-machine household. We still have my last PC tower, bought about ten years ago, which has been upgraded so many times I’m not sure there’s any of the original machine left. It runs Ubuntu and remains a very capable computer. And we have a number of Mac laptops which we’ve often had to do a little bit of DIY repair or upgrade work on. But I do worry that these days of tinkering are drawing to a close. With the rise of the smartphone and tablet, we have more processing power than ever before, but you can’t just pop open an iPad to swap out the memory or upgrade the motherboard. Even with laptops and netbooks, the ‘user serviceable parts’ are few and far between. The excellent iFixit.com has step-by-step guides for fixing almost everything, from PCs and Macs to phones and games consoles, but it takes a brave person to crack a Macbook and have a fiddle around inside, not least because it’s so easy to accidentally break the case. IBM’s 5051 wasn’t just a game-changer for the industry, it was a watershed for geeks. Creating a computer from widely available parts spawned not just a whole industry of IBM clone manufacturers, it gave birth to a whole generation of tinkerers who learnt how computers work by taking them apart and, hopefully successfully, putting them back together again. What was your first computer? What has the PC meant to you? And what does it mean now?