IBM Unveils the Personal Computer at New York's Waldorf Hotel
Priced at $1,565 with 16KB of RAM and no disk drive, the IBM 5150 didn't look like a revolution on paper. Its open architecture is what made it one anyway.
On August 12, 1981, IBM unveiled its Personal Computer, model 5150, at New York’s Waldorf Hotel — priced at $1,565 for a base configuration with 16 kilobytes of RAM and no disk drive, bundled with two software packages, VisiCalc and EasyWriter.
The team behind it
The 5150 was developed by a team directed by William C. Lowe and Philip Don Estridge, working out of IBM’s Boca Raton, Florida facility — notably operating with unusual independence from IBM’s normal, much slower product development processes, which is part of why the team was able to ship a competitive product within about a year of the project’s start.
The immediate commercial reception
IBM sold roughly 65,000 units within the first four months on the market, and had taken 100,000 orders by Christmas 1981 — strong enough early demand to establish the machine as a serious commercial success well before its longer-term industry impact became clear.
Why this specific launch mattered far beyond its immediate sales figures
The 5150’s open architecture and third-party-licensable operating system — decisions driven by IBM’s need to ship quickly rather than any deliberate long-term strategy — enabled an entire ecosystem of IBM-compatible computers from other manufacturers within just a few years, eventually making “PC compatible” the industry’s dominant computing architecture for decades.
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