1980 - 1981
1980
Alan Shugart, having left IBM and founded his own company, Shugart Associates,
continued his leadership in the development of storage devices by introducing
the Winchester hard drive, thereby revolutionizing the storage capabilities
of personal computers. No longer would personal computers be limited to
tiny internal memories and slow external storage cassette tapes or diskettes.
The personal computer moved from being a microcomputer limited by its storage
capabilities to compete effectively with the power of many mainframe systems,
and certainly with the majority of minicomputers.
1981
After waiting for the opposition to soften up the market, IBM entered the
field in 1981 with the IBM "PC" and supported by the DOS operating system
developed under an agreement that gave Microsoft all the profits in exchange
for the development costs having been borne by Microsoft. Disregarding
CP/M that had been the choice for earlier machines, IBM chose to go in
a radically different direction on the marketing assumption (that turned
out to be correct) that the purchasers of the PC were a different breed
than those who were prepared to build their own system from a kit. Using
a caricature of Charlie Chaplin as the user who was able to take the PC
out of the box and immediately begin using it, IBM attracted a community
of users who wanted the machine for its usefulness rather than its intrinsic
engineering appeal.
Planning to get ahead of the competition Osborne Computer Corporation
began marketing the first self-contained, portable microcomputer in 1981,
complete with a with monitor, disk drives and carrying case -- the Osborne
1. That same year Commodore introduced the VIC-20, and quickly sold 1 million
units!