Okay, I exaggerate . . . a bit:
When IBM released its first personal computer, the 5150, 30 years ago, it was deliberately drab — black, gray, and low-key. That’s because IBM intended the 5150 to be a serious machine for people doing serious work.
So how better to celebrate this important anniversary than by using the 5150 for what it was meant to do? Working on a 5150 seems to be a tall task in today’s vastly accelerated computing world, however. Could a PC that’s as old as I am manage to email, surf the Web, produce documents, edit photos, and even tweet?
I sequestered myself for four days amid boxes of 5.25-inch floppy drives and serial cables to find out. The answer to my question turned out to be both yes and no — but more interesting was all the retro-computing magic I had to perform. In the end, my experiment proved two things:
- People now use the PC for many things that weren’t even conceived of in 1981, and the 5150, unsurprisingly, is woefully underpowered for those advanced tasks. But when you use it for the core computing tasks the 5150 was designed for, IBM’s first PC has still got game.
- Early floppy discs were just too darned small!
