As usual with these anniversaries in personal computing history, The Silicon Underground has dedicated a blog post to it that is well-worth a read:

https://dfarq.homeip.net/ibm-pc-introduced-au … -august-12-1981

Many of us know the key parts of the PC's history, how IBM went against their own instinct and went with an open architecture, how they set up a separate team to work on its design down in Boca Raton, Florida, far away from the IBM Mothership in Armonk, NY with its corporate cultural baggage, how they licensed MS-DOS and empowered Microsoft because Gary Kildall was out flying his plane just when IBM's people came knocking to license CP/M from him, how they wrongly thought that their exclusive copyright over the IBM PC BIOS would allow them to retain control over the platform, and so on.

But reading the article, it's particularly interesting how IBM actually was inspired by Steve Wozniak's extensible and upgradable Apple II design, which was exactly what Steve Jobs shunned so much and went against when he envisioned the Macintosh, preferring to offer a home/personal computer as a black-box appliance.

Both philosophies survive to this day, even though it's regrettable how long Microsoft has managed to control the former for such a long time. Only with the recent uptake in desktop Linux as a result of people increasingly getting fed up with Windows 11, are we getting a glimpse of how open the PC architecture can truly be, when it's open and extensible on the software side as well as on the hardware side.

Here's to 45 years of standard extensible and customizable personal computers, and may the future of the PC be even more open! ❤️