IBM's arrival makes the personal computer respectable

What happened

A small team in Florida broke the company's habits to get the product out quickly, buying a processor from Intel, licensing an operating system rather than writing one, and documenting the expansion bus so outsiders could build cards for it. The result was not technically remarkable next to machines already on sale, and it was expensive. What it had was a name that purchasing departments trusted, which pulled desktop computers out of the hobby shop and into offices, and from offices into the homes of people who had started using them at work.

Openness carried a cost the company underestimated. Because almost nothing in the design was proprietary except a small piece of startup software, competitors reverse-engineered that piece and sold compatible machines, often cheaper and faster. Within a few years the standard belonged to the market rather than to its originator. For games the effect was slow and then overwhelming: an architecture nobody controlled, upgraded piecemeal by its owners, eventually outpaced the specialized home computers that had better graphics and sound at the start.

The world at the time

By 1981 the personal computer market was several years old and led by companies born inside it, with the Apple II strong in schools and small businesses. IBM dominated large-scale data processing and was widely assumed to be too slow to compete for desktops. Games on these machines were mostly written by individuals and sold in modest quantities.

What it changed

Compatible manufacturers drove prices down for a decade while add-in cards handled sound and, later, three-dimensional graphics. Standardization gave developers one large target instead of a dozen small ones, which supported the shareware boom, the shooter and strategy genres, and eventually digital storefronts. Console makers themselves adopted the same processor family much later.