On 12 August 1981, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in midtown Manhattan, IBM unveiled the company’s entrant into the nascent personal computer market:

How the IBM PC Won, Then Lost, the Personal Computer Market

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2021-07-21 21:30:06

On 12 August 1981, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in midtown Manhattan, IBM unveiled the company’s entrant into the nascent personal computer market: the IBM PC. With that, the preeminent U.S. computer maker launched another revolution in computing, though few realized it at the time. Press coverage of the announcement was lukewarm.

Soon, though, the world began embracing little computers by the millions, with IBM dominating those sales. The personal computer vastly expanded the number of people and organizations that used computers. Other companies, including Apple and Tandy Corp., were already making personal computers, but no other machine carried the revered IBM name. IBM’s essential contributions were to position the technology as suitable for wide use and to set a technology standard. Rivals were compelled to meet a demand that they had all grossly underestimated. As such, IBM had a greater effect on the PC’s acceptance than did Apple, Compaq, Dell, and even Microsoft.

Despite this initial dominance, by 1986 the IBM PC was becoming an also-ran. And in 2005, the Chinese computer maker Lenovo Group purchased IBM’s PC business.