Today in 1981, IBM announced its first desktop computer, the System/23 Datamaster.
It was based on Intel’s 8086 16-bit processor and featured a viewing screen, up to 4.4 megabytes of diskette storage, and Business Management Accounting and Word Processing programs. It was “designed to be taken out of the carton, set up, checked out and operated by first-time users.” At $9,830 (with optional word processing at an additional $1,100 to $2,200), the Datamaster was IBM’s lowest-priced small business system.
But it was the IBM Personal Computer, announced in August 1981-- and its immediate descendants — that took the features and characteristics of all these early small computers and provided them in one incredibly utilitarian machine. With the PC, the widest possible range of users could now perform with a single product all of the functions which had up until then been optimized in such offerings as the 5100, Displaywriter and 5520. If the IBM Personal Computer signaled the dawn of a new era in computing, then its quick ascent to mass acceptance and success had been made possible by those little remembered IBM pioneers that had come before.