Are you old enough to remember Grease, the movie? How about the Bee Gees wearing tight pants and singing with those high-pitched voices in the late 1970s? Or Shirley Strachan and Red Symons strutting their stuff with SkyHooks? Well all of these things occurred well and truly before personal computers hit the scene.

The personal computer revolution started on August 21, 1981 when IBM released a new computer called the Personal Computer. The growth of the industry spawned by this computer hasn’t stopped since.

The standalone, or personal, computer grew out of an interest in hobby electronics - as a consequence it took a great deal of time before the concept of these machines gained acceptance in the business world.

The first of these hobby machines become available in 1975 when Popular Mechanics featured an article on how to build a "computer" called the Altair 8800. This computer didn’t really do much except flash a series of lights in a particular sequence. However, it could be instructed, or programmed to do this in a variety of ways - it is the ability to be able to change the instructions in a machine that makes it a computer.

To assist in the programming of the Altair, MITS of Albuquerque, New Mexico in January 1975, licensed BASIC, a special computer programming language, from Bill Gates and Paul Allen, two college students.

On November 29, 1975 Paul Allen suggested the name of Micro-soft to Bill Gates as a name for their fledgling partnership.

In 1977 two more college students Steve Jobs and Steve Wosniak, working from a home garage, developed a computer, which could be linked to a monitor and display alphabetical letters. This was the first Apple computer.

Within one year Apple became the fastest growing company in America by adopting a shrewd marketing campaign of selling computers to schools who wanted to teach computing but couldn’t afford mainframe or mini computer systems.

During the late 1970s a number of companies began developing computers - but, by and large, they were still considered to be an extension of the electronics hobby market.

Bill Lowe, an engineer of immense vision and energy, however, was carefully watching these events, at IBM. His research showed him that less than 10 percent of the 14 million small businesses in America were using personal computers, and that less than 3 percent of employees in corporate organisations were using personal computers.

In July 1980 he had managed to convince IBM’s Corporate Management Committee (CMC) to allow him to develop a new, personal computer. The prototype was completed and exhibited to the CMC one month later. The first image to appear on the monitor of the IBM Personal was a vixen, followed later by a rocket ship ejecting a projectile across the screen - hardly a display that would likely inspire a future revolution in computing.

The committee, while impressed, was still cautious. It offered Lowe the financial backing to develop the computer providing that it be released to the public no more than one year later - this can be a pretty tall ask in an organisation as monolithic and bureaucratic as IBM.

Lowe returned to Boca Raton, Florida, and assembled what was arguably one of the most talented development teams in the history of IBM. Project Chess, as it was code named, was now underway.

However, with a team of only 12 and a short time frame Lowe realised that it could not develop the operating system, the software that makes the computer work, by itself. So, in one of the few occasions in IBM’s history, they went outside the organisation for an operating system.

After investigating several companies IBM decided to buy the operating system from Microsoft who by that stage were starting to gain a reputation for supplying good operating systems for personal computers. This ultimately contributed to Bill Gates becoming a billionaire by the age of 31.

As another departure from IBM convention it was decided that the personal computer would be sold through department stores.

The personal computer was scheduled for release on August 21, 1981. For the preceding week crates of the machines were shipped to Seers & and Computerland stores around America.

The day before the launch project team members discovered a potentially dangerous loose wire in the computers that could easily short-circuit and possibly electrocute users. As a mark of their dedication and commitment team members were willingly dispatched to every store that would sell the computers, opened every carton, and fixed the loose wire in every single computer - well before the doors opened for the launch!

As soon as the machine was released it was a success. IBM production had geared up to produce only 100,000 units of the computer. Within weeks of the launch orders for more than 200,000 had been received.

Today the machine that was released in 1981 is used mostly as a conversation piece or boat anchor - such has been the change in technology since then.

In 1983 IBM upgraded the computer and released the IBM PC-XT. The XT had extra features, such as a hard disk for storing larger amounts of data.

In 1985 IBM released the IBM PC-AT which had a much more powerful processing chip and could operate much faster than the XT. This machine had the Intel 80286 computer chip.

In 1987 IBM released yet another upgrade- the IBM PS/2

Today IBM has lost a lot of its original market penetration to a host of competitors and imitators. Almost as soon as the original IBM was released it was copied, or cloned, by competitors who released comparable machines at a lower price.

While the machine was easy to clone, the operating system was protected by US patents and belonged to IBM who had contracted Microsoft to develop it.

However, in a shrewd ploy Microsoft itself released another operating system, MS-DOS, that would essentially look and operate the same as the IBM system, PC-DOS, without infringing copyright or patents. This system became available to computer clone manufacturers. As a consequence Microsoft found itself providing operating systems to both IBM and IBM’s competitors - it couldn’t lose!