PC and web celebrate birthdays

This week sees the anniversaries of the first IBM PC and the web.

This week sees the 25th Anniversary of the PC, after the IBM Personal Computer was launched on 12th August 1981 at a press conference at the Waldorf Astoria ballroom in New York City.

Two decades earlier, an IBM computer often cost as much as $9m and required an air-conditioned quarter-acre of space and a staff of 60 people to keep it fully loaded with instructions.

The new PC could not only process information faster than those earlier machines but it could hook up to the home TV set, play games, process text and harbour more words than a large cookbook.

The $1,565 price bought a system unit, a keyboard and a colour/graphics capability. The system unit was powered by an Intel 8088 microprocessor. It was the size of a portable typewriter and contained 40K of read-only memory and 16K of user memory, as well as a built-in speaker for generating music.

'The next 25 years of the PC will still have many surprises in store for us and our customers,' said Vincent Fauquenot, spokesperson for PC manufacturer Lenovo, the Chinese firm that now owns the former IBM PC business.

This week also sees the 15th birthday of the worldwide web. On 6 August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee released the software and the concept that underpins the web to the general public for the first time.

In the post accompanying the release Berners-Lee said at the time that the project 'aims to allow links to be made to any information anywhere.'

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