Thank You, IBM … Here’s To Another 100 Years

I do what I do because of one company … IBM. Why? Because in the 1970s, I got into computers, with a ZX81 (1KB of RAM) and a Dragon 32 (32 KB of RAM). They were very much home computers, and where you would rush out and buy the latest computer magazine, and then spend a happy evening entering some BASIC code that made a cursor move across the screen using the IJLM keys. If you were very lucky you would manage to save it to a cassette — that could take over ten minutes to save a simple program — only to get an error at the end. I was hooked! But, at work, we had a DEC VAX minicomputer, and which cost a fortune to buy and maintain (even in those days). This mini ran typically Pascal, and I remember running labs for students, and where they all decided to compile their program at the same time, and 30 minutes later, some of them would get their errors, and have to compile it again. Basically, every lab ended with me saying, “Sorry about that.” The VAX, though, was not designed to support 25 students compiling their program at the same time … it was a batch processing machine and wanted to be given jobs that it could run whenever it had time. It basically came from the days when you handed in your punch cards (containing either FORTRAN if you were an engineer or COBOL if you were more business-focused) to someone with a white coat, and then came back the next week with a printed output with green lined paper. But, just in time, the IBM PC arrived, and it was heavy but beautiful. So, as many in my department pushed for the VAX, but pushed for the PC for our labs. With their clock speed of 4.7 MHz, and 640KB of memory, I went ahead and bought a batch for a new PC lab. In those days there were no network switches, so they all connected with coaxial cable and had T-pieces to connect to the shared Ethernet bus. My logic was that we were paying around £20K for maintenance on the VAX, and where we could buy 20 £1K PC clones for the same cost. But, we’d have to maintain them. And, it worked. It freed us, and allowed us to run the classic Turbo Pascal (and Turbo C): Our student could now bring in their 5-inch floppy disks and save their programs for later use. And the size of the hard disk? 20MB! And, so, it is to IBM that we turn in starting the PC revolution, and today is the 100th anniversary of the IBM name — and first defined on 15 Feb 1924.