If there is a date on which the definitive victory of the PC over other personal computers was marked, it was in 1983, the date from which the gap in market share was already insurmountable for the other platforms and was going mark the 80s that would end with the swan song of brands like Commodore and Amiga. The sole survivor of all PC rivals was Apple, since its high margins gave it a few extra years of headroom that allowed it to survive until the return of a Steve Jobs who made the necessary changes for the brand to bitten apple could rebound. However, the Intel and Microsoft platform had already been the de facto standard for over a decade.
What was the first computer with a hard drive?
On the cover of the January 1983 issue of TIME magazine was a papier-mâché sculpture of a man seated at a table looking at a computer on a kitchen table. An atypical place for the use of a personal computer, but at that time their adoption had not yet reached the masses, despite the fact that sales were doubling year by year, it had been a marginal product, but that everything indicated that they would end up taking off that same year.
IBM’s bet, the only PC maker to date, was an upgraded version of its 5150 as the 5160 or PCXT. The processor has not changed generations, but I stop being an 8088 to be an 8086. However, the great innovation it introduces would completely change the way a computer is used and give it a huge edge over the competition. We are talking about and 10 MB hard drive who introduced and made it the first computer with a hard drive, it certainly became what we now call a Killer App.
Why did this give the PC a huge advantage?
Before the advent of the hard drive, computers’ operating system was in ROM memory, which not only meant that its capabilities could not be expanded, and the fact that you bought the same system a few months later meant that you had a system a little less good in said aspect. Having a hard drive, on the other hand, allowed to extend the operating system without problems, in addition to not spending all his time sharing floppy disks in an office. Not to mention saying goodbye to the dual floppy disk drives that were used in many systems.
Even if the biggest advantage was the fact of being able to work for the first time with large files of several hundred megabytes, without being limited by the size of a few hundred kilobytes of the floppy disks of the time. Working with very large volumes of data. However, implementing the hard disk as standard in the system brought about a series of significant changes in the peripheral communication system that necessitated the release of a new generation of computers.
And it turned out that applications began to be programmed with the hard disk in mind and abandoned to other platforms, which for years remained without using the hard disk and made the PC enter a large number of steps.
