IBM introduced its personal computer to the American public in August of 1981. It cost approximately $1,500 and included the following components: a system unit, a keyboard and a color/graphics capability. Buyers had the option of also purchasing a display, a printer, two diskette drives, extra memory, communications, game adapter and application packages. Just 20 years prior, an IBM computer had cost upwards of [$9 million and needed to be stored in an air-conditioned, quarter-acre of space and required a staff of 60 people to keep it fully loaded with instructions]. The system was powered on the Intel 8088 microprocessor, which had 29,000 transistors and had a processing speed of 5MHz, with a turbo version released later that ran at 8MHz. To put this in perspective, the Intel 8088 performed of a speed less than one-thousandth that of a modern processor.
The following shows a brief comparison between the Intel 8088 and the more current Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E8300:
| Processor | Clock Speed | Transistors | Addressable Memory | Bus Speed | Typical Use |
| Intel 8088 (introduced in 1979) | 8 MHz (turbo) 5 MHz (standard) | 29,000 | 64 KB | 8 MHz (turbo) 5 MHz (standard) | Desktop PCs |
| Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E8300 (introduced in 2008) | 2.83 GHz | 410 million | 64 GB | 1033 MT/s | Desktop PCs |
The article was fairly short, but it was super interesting, almost more from a business strategy perspective than a technological one though. Looking at the specs for the Intel 8088 didn’t really mean much until I compared it to more modern technology, than it was like “Wow!” For the respective time period though, the personal computer and its capabilities were incredible. It’s pretty amazing to see how far technology has come, how much it has advanced, isn’t it?
My article link: http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc25/pc25_birth.html
