THE STORY OF THE PC & APC
“Start publishing as quickly as you can before competition grabs the market”. With this advice from UK publishing magnate Felix Dennis accompanying a box of magazines, a 21-year-old Sean Howard embarked on a new career path to launch Australia’s first personal computer magazine. It was the era of the Sinclair ZX-80, the Tandy TRS-80 and in May 1980, the first issue of Australian Personal Computer rolled off the printing presses to explain this brave new world to technology enthusiasts.
Despite the trials of the magazine-publishing game, APC, as we now know it, has survived and flourished, having been published each and every month since and this month tops a milestone 500th issue. Over the next few pages, we’ll look back at the history of the PC, and the magazine that has tracked it ever since it all began.
Project ‘Chess’
About the same time Howard was putting together the third issue of Australian Personal Computer, another fledgling effort was being organised, this time by tech giant IBM. Like many big companies of the time, IBM wasn’t all that agile and an idea presented by Bill Lowe, director of IBM’s Entry Level Systems unit, to produce a personal computer didn’t overly excite the executives from the Corporate Management Committee. However, Lowe was less interested in creating new IBM technology and more interested in using what was already on the market.
IBM then-chairman Frank Cary was sold on Lowe’s idea of a small team of engineers coming up with a product inside 12 months. The result was ‘Project Chess’.
We take interoperability for granted today, but back in the 1970s and 80s, computers were siloed designs – each company created its own proprietary hardware and software combo to the point that as a consumer, you had to lock yourself into that company’s vision of computing.
The goal for IBM was to use off-the-shelf parts wherever possible and create a computer system
