Apple's famous ad.

On August 12th, 1981, IBM announced its first PC. That makes today the thirtieth anniversary of the platform that’s sometimes been called the PC clone, IBM PC compatible, or Wintel…but is most often simply called the PC. We started our celebration on Thursday with Benj Edwards’ look at PC oddities such as Bill Gates’s donkey-avoidance game. But thinking about some of the weirdness that the PC inspired got me to thinking: what if IBM, which took a long time to decide to do a PC at all, had decided not to do one? What if it had decided that microcomputers were a blip and it should stick to mainframes?

The announcement of the PC was one of the most important moments in tech history, since computers based on the PC’s design quickly flooded the market and established a standard which lives on to this day in every Windows PC. As I played around with the idea of the IBM PC suddenly vanishing from the history books, I started asking myself questions, and trying to come up with answers. (Hey, the whole subject is so unknowable that there’s no such thing as a wrong answer…)

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On August 12th, 1981, IBM announced its first PC. I was a high school student at the time, and was totally unimpressed. The machine was boxy and boring, with graphics that couldn’t compare to something like the Atari 800. And it was way too pricey. Who’d go for that?

Lots of people, it turned out–and even today, the vast majority of us use PCs directly descended from IBM’s first one. To mark one of the most important anniversaries in computing history, Benj Edwards, as is his wont, has focused in on some its sidelights and curiosities. Read about them in IBM PC Oddities.

IBM’s Selectric isn’t the only Very Important Tech Product marking an anniversary. MS-DOS turns 30 today. (Via Mary Jo Foley.)

Last month, I had fun paying tribute to Polaroid’s SX-70, an old-technology gadget that’s all the more extraordinary because there was nothing digital about it. The SX-70 came to mind again when I learned that IBM’s Selectric typewriter is marking its fiftieth anniversary. It was a great leap forward beyond every typewriter of the time, both technologically sophisticated and beautifully designed. And it remains pretty darn cool even if most of us will never use one again.

To celebrate the Selectric’s fiftieth, I put together a slideshow of evocative images and interesting factoids, including stuff about later models–such as the $21,000 (!!!) Selectric Magnetic Tape Composer. Here it is.

What’s the most significant arcade game of all time? Pac-Man, probably. But you could also make the case for Donkey Kong–a game that celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this month. It was wildly popular in its day. It remains iconic. And it was the breakout hit that put both Nintendo and Mario on the map–a team-up of game company and character that’s as important today as ever.

And then there are all the weird little Donkey Kong footnotes. Such as the fact it was almost about Popeye and Bluto. And the odd spinoffs (Donkey Kong hockey?). Gaming historian Benj Edwards has rounded up a bunch of them for Donkey Kong Oddities, our tribute to video gaming’s greatest ape.

Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) is justly famous for his 1945 Atlantic essay “As We May Think.” It proposes a device called a memex which bears an uncanny resemblance to a personal computer connected to the World Wide Web–or at least as close as anyone could come five decades before the Web changed the world.

As described in the Atlantic article, the memex was the size of a desk. But Bush also had an idea for a portable microfilm reader–which sounds like it would have been to the Kindle as the memex was to the PC–and tried to convince Edwin Land, cofounder of Polaroid, to help him build it. That’s one of the innumerable interesting things about Polaroid which I learned but couldn’t fit into my story “Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible.”

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Polaroid co-founder Edwin Land with an SX-70 and an SX-70 snapshot in his Cambridge, Massachusetts office on November 1st, 1972. Photo: Joyce Dopkeen/Getty Images

What makes a gadget great? You might argue that it’s determined at least in part by how many lives the product in question touches. Back in 2005, when I helped choose a list of the fifty greatest gadgets of the past fifty years, we ranked the Sony Walkman as #1 and Apple’s iPod as #2. Fabulous gizmos both; I suspect, however, that they wouldn’t have topped the list if they hadn’t been bestsellers of epic proportions.

The SX-70--specifically, the SX-70 which I bought at an antique store in Redwood City, California in April of 2011.

But greatness isn’t a popularity contest–not primarily one, at least. Maybe it has more to do with the concept expressed by Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law: making technology indistinguishable from magic. By that measure, I can’t think of a greater gadget than the SX-70 Land Camera, the instant camera that Polaroid introduced in April 1972. We ranked the SX-70 eighth on that 2005 list, but the sheer magnitude of its ambition and innovation dwarfs the Walkman, iPod, and nearly every other consumer-electronics product you can name.

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Shamefully, I’ve neglected to cover the biggest news of the past couple of weeks. I refer, of course, to the return of Microsoft Office’s Clippy, in a game/tutorial from Microsoft called Office Hero 2. (Here’s James Fallows’ report on it.)  Clippy may not be part of Office’s help system anymore, but here he is again, trying to help people use Office. I have the feeling he’ll be with us in one form or another for years to come. (Anyone want to make bets on whether he’ll outlive Mavis Beacon?)

Thinking about his return got me thinking about a Technologizer story from a couple of years ago: “The Secret Origins of Clippy: Microsoft’s Bizarre Animated Character Patents.” It remains one of the most popular things we’ve ever published. And here it is again.

Unless you’re willfully oblivious to Moore’s Law, you know that today’s computers do a whole lot more than ones from twenty or thirty years ago, for a whole let less money. But to really judge how much more bang we get for the buck, you’ve got to adjust prices for inflation. In 2009, Benj Edwards did just that for a story we called “Classic PCs vs. New PCs: Their True Cost.” I’ll bet he was the first person to discover that a Commodore 64 and an HP Pavilion Elite cost exactly the same amount–and to compare them spec by spec.

On yesterday night’s NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams reported the tragic news of the passing of a beloved international icon: the typewriter.

The factoid about the last typewriter factory closing struck me as surprising–even implausible. The typewriter may have been an endangered species for decades, but many, many businesses move really, really slowly. If there are still companies in America who use them–and I’ll bet even some big outfits have them on hand to address the occasional envelope–there are surely ones elsewhere in the world who aren’t ready to give them up.

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What’s the most underappreciated decade in the history of personal computers to date? Easy: The 1990s. It was a transitional period, long past the era when early giants such as the Apple II and TRS-80 ruled the world, but before things got totally commoditized. Plenty of interesting, imaginative, sometimes just plain odd computers were released during it, but few of them have gotten the glory–or at least attention–that they deserve.

Computing history guru Benj Edwards, however, remembers. And he’s pulled together recollections of fifteen 1990s machines, including a PC from Sega, an Apple that wasn’t a Mac, an Atari laptop, an HP with a built-in mouse, a NeXT that didn’t come from NeXT, and more. If you’re like me, you’ll enjoy being reminded of some of them–and will learn about others for the first time.

View “15 Amazing Computing Rarities of the 1990s” slide show.