Thirty years ago today, IBM officially ushered in what many consider to be the modern computing era with the 5150th What eventually became just as IBM PC was the first machine, a Microsoft operating system (recently acquired PC-DOS) on an Intel processor (the 4.77MHz 8088) and inspired countless clones known to run. The bare-bones model, the cost was $ 1,565, cheap enough to become a serious commercial success, and brought a whole cottage industry machinery, which touted its IBM PC compatibility. We won 't spend too much time telling the story of how IBM' s decision to take a computer off the shelf components and commercially available software build forged a standard, whose origin still survive today in the form of Wintel. But if you 're feeling a little nostalgic, you can use the original PR of 12 To August 1981 read shortly after the break.