Past Forward: A Tool for Modern Times.

On 12 August 1981, at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in midtown Manhattan, IBM unveiled its entrant into the nascent personal computer market: the IBM PC. With that, the preeminent U.S. computer maker launched another revolution in computing. Soon the world began embracing little computers by the millions, with IBM dominating those sales. Other companies, including Apple and Tandy Corp., were already making personal computers, but no other machine carried the revered IBM name. IBM's essential contributions were to position the technology as suitable for wide use and to set a technical standard. Rivals were compelled to meet a demand that they had all grossly underestimated. As such, IBM had a greater impact on the personal computer's acceptance than did Apple, Compaq, Dell, and even Microsoft. And yet IBM's lead in this new market would last only a few years, and the eclipse of the IBM PC came to mirror the decline of Big Blue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]