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.
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.
Oh, that’s right! It was expandable to that amount, but not necessarily out of the box to that amount. I forgot about that!