Happy Birthday to the IBM PC

The IBM PC turned 43 on the 12th of August and I, for one, have fond and interesting memories of its birth. I’m a bit behind the curve on writing this article, but here it is, anyway. You can read the public history and the original specifications on Wikipedia, but this is my story — at least part of it.

I was working as a Course Development Representative in Boca Raton, Florida in late December of 1980, when my manager, Newt, came to me a bit furtively. I had just finished a big project and was ready for a new one. I was especially intrigued when he invited me into his office and closed the door.

After getting seated, he asked if I would like to work on a new and very secret project. One that I had to keep from the other course writers in the department. Because we were almost always working on one secret project or another, this wasn’t too unusual, but he went on to explain that before he could tell me about it, I’d need to sign another non-disclosure agreement (NDA) that was more explicit and strict than the normal one under which we all worked.

After signing the agreement, he told me about “Acorn,” which turned out to be a personal computer. There was already a team developing the PC, Model 5150, and it was time to create the training course for it. The catch was that the IBM Typewriter Division, different from General Systems Division (GSD) which I belonged to, would have responsibility for performing field repairs. And, since these PCs were going to be sold by ComputerLand and Sears, the same course would be provided to those dealers.

Preparation

The first thing I did was get some basic familiarization from the project leaders, and from Vern Rassmusen, who, as the Customer Support Representative (CSR) was responsible for ensuring the product was safe and easily maintainable with typical tools available to the Customer Engineers (CE) in the field. In addition to the training course, I was also assigned the CSR role for the IBM printer, which was a slightly modified Epson dot-matrix printer, Model 5152.

Based on that initial encounter with the PC, and the range of people expected to be using and repairing them, I decided that our normal, “fly everybody in for a week-long training,” would be way too expensive and that ComputerLand and Sears would not be willing to pay those expenses or to have their technical people gone for a week. So field training was required.

I needed to have a PC in my office so that I could work effectively. Because of the extreme — even for IBM — secrecy surrounding this project, certain modifications to my office were required. A lock was installed on my door — up to that time only managers had locks on their doors. I also needed to have a special filing cabinet with a bar-lock installed for additional security beyond the normal file cabinet locks. But the most fun thing was that site security required that I have chicken wire installed in the ceiling of my office to, “prevent spys from entering the adjacent office and climbing over the wall into mine.”

Getting started

When all the security requirements were met, the factory delivered the PC I would use to write the course to my office. This was serial number 00000001 with the number scratched into the frame by hand. This unit was the first test PC to be built on the manufacturing line as opposed to being hand-built by the development team.

The PC had no top cover as those hadn’t been made yet. The monochrome display, Model 5151, had no case whatsoever and was simply placed in a cardboard box.

I started working with the PC and the documentation I’d been given and came up with some plans. I wrote the original version of course as a textbook only course. The trainees would have no contact with the PC itself. But, as we always did, we brought in several CEs from the Typewriter Division and had them go through the course. The class size was limited to a less than ideal statistical number, but is was enough to determine that this rather traditional training method failed miserably for the audience which had no previous experience of any kind with computers. They fixed complex Selectric typewriters but the totally electro-mechanical nature of those devices bore no resemblance to the PC and the skills and knowledge required to fix it.

Second Try

With the announce date closing in, I completely revised my approach by changing the course to a hands-on one. Every IBM branch and every ComputerLand and Sears outlet that would be selling the IBM PC would need to have a PC on which the CEs and other service people could get actual hands-on.

Since no software was readily available for the PC at that stage, and certainly no software that could create training courses, I use the on-board, ROM-based ABASIC (Advanced BASIC) to write a program that could create the data required for the training course. Then, of course, I wrote the software to deliver that training course to the students. And then I wrote the training course itself. Those efforts overlapped considerably and it all required a great deal of additional testing by me and others.

I was still working in my very secure office and had all this partially completed equipment spread out on my desk. One day, as I was entering a new page for the course, I heard a very loud “POP” and jumped out of my chair as the open System Unit filled with micro-shreds of paper from an exploded paper capacitor on the motherboard. That scared the daylights out of me. After replacing the motherboard, I also had them bring me a cover for the system unit and a new monochrome display that had a proper case on it.

It took a couple hours to remove all the paper shreds from my hair. But it was pretty funny. Too bad no one else got to see it.

Announcement Day

Although the IBM PC was announced on August 12, 1981, IBM was nowhere near ready to deliver the hardware. The manufacturing line was still in test mode, some late design changes had not been implemented, and the training was not ready. Not even close.

So I made a very unusual request. After proving I couldn’t finish the course and have it tested by the end of October, which was the latest that it could be ready in order for first deliveries in December, and signing many more papers, I took home a complete IBM PC with monochrome display and printer. This was before the mouse.

This would allow me to work at home on the project and still have some time with my family. So I claim that I was the first person to have an IBM PC at home. I can’t tell you if that’s a valid claim or not, but I make it anyway.

I did complete the course and tested it successfully just in time to make the deadline for having the course available.

FCS

FCS was IBM-speak for first customer ship. FCS occurred in early December as I recall. The objective was to have it available in stores in time for Christmas and Hanukkah.

Around that same time, I was required to return the two PCs I had been using to write the course. They were both sent to the crusher, and I was devastated at that. They should have been saved for posterity, but…IBM. Not that I had anywhere to store them myself.

Musings

I had a lot of fun creating the training course for the IBM PC. I also learned a lot and decided that I had to have one for myself. So I ordered one with 64K of RAM on the motherboard, printer, and monochrome display and display adapter. I also purchased the word processing program EasyWriter that we used to call “sleazywriter,” VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, and a couple programs for the kids. All of that cost about $5,500 — on the employee purchase plan.

I used that system for many years, eventually adding the expansion unit with a 5MB hard drive, which seemed huge at the time. Even after upgrading to a PC-AT, I kept that old PC until we had no more room for it.