THE TRUE STORY BEHIND THE IBM PERSONAL COMPUTER
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
So begins The War Of The Worlds by HG Wells, and while some IBM executives of the late 1970s may have taken offence at this comparison – the world being watched was the explosive growth of personal computers, the eyes behind the microscope belonging to IBM – there is a ring of truth to this parallel. The main difference was that the template of the PC, as established by IBM, would outlast all of the “transient creatures” other than Apple.
There was one other crucial difference: those creatures knew they were being watched. Everyone in the nascent microcomputer industry knew it was a matter of time before IBM would make the leap from building mainframes and minicomputers to PCs. The only question was when.
One popular story goes that the IBM Personal Computer was kicked into action in mid-1980 when Atari sent a letter to IBM’s then chairman, Frank Cary, suggesting that it could make IBM’s PCs. Rather than fling the invitation into the bin, so the stories go, Cary passed it on to Bill Lowe. Now dubbed “The father of the IBM PC”, at that time Lowe was IBM’s director of entry systems.
Contemporary accounts suggest this is, at best, a blurring of facts. According to Ray Kassar, then CEO of Atari, the potential partnership was instigated by Bill Lowe. “We had two meetings actually, one in my office and another at my apartment in San Francisco with IBM,” said Kassar, quoted in the book Atari Inc: Business is Fun. But the discussions never got far, likely due to Atari’s proprietary
