Clone Wars: IBM Edition

If you search the Internet for “Clone Wars,” you’ll get a lot of Star Wars-related pages. But the original Clone Wars took place a long time ago in a galaxy much nearer to ours, and it has a lot to do with the computer you are probably using right now to read this. (Well, unless it is a Mac, something ARM-based, or an old retro-rig. I did say probably!) IBM is a name that, for many years, was synonymous with computers, especially big mainframe computers. However, it didn’t start out that way. IBM originally made mechanical calculators and tabulating machines. That changed in 1952 with the IBM 701, IBM’s first computer that you’d recognize as a computer. If you weren’t there, it is hard to understand how IBM dominated the computer market in the 1960s and 1970s. Sure, there were others like Univac, Honeywell, and Burroughs. But especially in the United States, IBM was the biggest fish in the pond. At one point, the computer market’s estimated worth was a bit more than $11 billion, and IBM’s five biggest competitors accounted for about $2 billion, with almost all of the rest going to IBM. So it was somewhat surprising that IBM didn’t roll out the personal computer first, or at least very early. Even companies that made “small” computers for the day, like Digital Equipment Corporation or Data General, weren’t really expecting the truly personal computer. That push came from companies no one had heard of at the time, like MITS, SWTP, IMASI, and Commodore. The IBM PC The story — and this is another story — goes that IBM spun up a team to make the IBM PC, expecting it to sell very little and use up some old keyboards previously earmarked for a failed word processor project. Instead, when the IBM PC showed up in 1981, it was a surprise hit. By 1983, there was the “XT” which was a PC with some extras, including a hard drive. In 1984, the “AT” showed up with a (gasp!) 16-bit 80286. The personal computer market had been healthy but small. Now the PC was selling huge volumes, perhaps thanks to commercials like the one below, and decimating other companies in the market. Naturally, others wanted a piece of the pie. Send in the Clones Anyone could make a PC-like computer, because IBM had used off-the-shelf parts for nearly everything. There were two things that really set the PC/XT/AT family apart. First, there was a bus for plugging in cards with video outputs, serial ports, memory, and other peripherals . You could start a fine business just making add-on cards, and IBM gave you all the details. This wasn’t unlike the S-100 bus created by the Altair, but the volume of PC-class machines far outstripped the S-100 market very quickly. In reality, there were really two buses. The PC/XT had an 8-bit bus, later named the ISA bus. The AT added an extra connector for the extra bits. You could plug...

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