Maximum PC - UK (2019-12)

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way your motherboard is laid out

to the size of your drive bays to the

layout of your keyboard.

Despite the weight of all of this

lineage, we have an extraordinary

range of devices that somehow get

lumped under the category “PC.”

Go back to the early ’80s, and

“PC” would evoke a desktop box

from the business colossus IBM,

but now the name doesn’t belong to

anyone, it still survives as “the PC.”

Flip through any PC magazine

and you’ll see everything from

bulky desktop computers to sleek

business laptops; from expensive

file servers to single-board devices

only a few inches big. Somehow,

all these machines are part of the

same PC family, and somehow they

can all talk to each other.

But where did all of this start?

That’s what we’ll be examining:

from the development of the PC

to its launch in the early ’80s, as

it fought off giants such as Apple,

as it was cloned by countless

manufacturers, and as it eventually

went 32-bit. We’ll look at the ’90s

and the start of the multimedia age,

the war between the chip makers,

and the establishment of Windows

as the world’s leading operating

system. Lastly, we’ll examine the

new millennium, initially dominated

by Microsoft and the PC, followed by

a slow shift to where we are now.

But before we go anywhere,

to understand the revolutionary

nature of the PC, you first need to

grasp who IBM was at the time, and

the culture that surrounded it.

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