Talk:IBM PC

I remember the first IBM PC

When the first IBM compatible PC was released, Microsoft (or Compaq?)--whoever built it--sent samples around to a lot of universities. I was working on an MS in CS at Univ. of Tenn., and my peers and I all made a point of going to look at the working model and its demo. We considered it to be ground-breaking at the time, but no one knew how earth shaking it would eventually be, and all because Microsoft chose to maintain backwards compatibility for programs. I knew someone in the late 1990's who had a hardware store, and someone had written a paint color-matching program on a IBM PC in the mid 1980's. As of the late 1990's, the hardware store was still using the little program to great advantage. And now, look at the turmoil in the Apple world because Apple has abandoned the concept of backward compatibility.

I think this article would benefit something about backward compatibility, and it would benefit from something about BIOS/CMOS memory as used when booting, and how the BIOS API allowed hardware built by different companies to look alike to MS-DOS. That is the same principle that became, in modern times, the virtual machine. It was the first time I encountered that concept and understood its importance. Although BIOS is now superceded by UEFI (?), it's importance in history should not be forgotten.

As a student, I was too destitute to buy one, but upon getting my first job, I went right out and bought the 2nd generation of IBM PC, that had an 8086 processor (16-bit bus instead of duplexed 8-bit bus). I was working at Bell Labs by then, which was totally UNIX centric, and everyone there tried like heck to ignore the IBM PC world as it began to grow. But over the years, I and a few other iconoclasts would periodically shake things up by developing some cheap software quickly using Visual Basic, doing in a month of free-lancing what a team of UNIX developers were taking 2 years and millions of dollars to do. The IBM PC and Microsoft were IMO a key development in computing at that time.Pat Palmer (talk) 00:38, 3 July 2020 (UTC)