On August 12th, 1981, IBM Introduced the PC: The IBM 5150. That's 25 years ago today. It wasn't the first personal computer on the market but it changed everything.
Costing $1,565, the 5150 had just 16K of memory - scarcely more than a couple of modest e-mails worth...
It altered the way business was done forever and sparked a revolution in home computing.
"It's hard to imagine what people used to do with computers in those days because by modern standards they really couldn't do anything," said Tom Standage, the Economist magazine's business editor told the World Service's Analysis programme.
"But there were still things you could do with a computer that you couldn't do without it like spreadsheets and word processing."
Back in the day, the premier wordprocessing program was WordStar which has all but disappeared today. The spreadsheet was VisiCalc.
Of course, the big thing about the IBM PC was the open architecture, something that would eventually force IBM out of the market, but would assure the explosion of personal ownership of computers as hordes of third-party developers competed and drove prices down.
That open architecture sparked an explosion in PC sales and also paved the way for common standards - something business had craved.
Since then the PC has come to dominate the home and the office and led the move to the online era with cheap global communication, e-commerce and for consumers the ability to find the answer to almost any question on the web.
Twenty-five years. That's a single generation between what we had then and what we have today. I have children who aren't yet 25 years old.
Capitalism is stunning in its effect.
