Computer Industry Almanac: 25-Years PC Anniversary Statistics; IBM-Compatible PC Sales Have Topped 1.5B Units With $B 3,100 Value.ARLINGTON HEIGHTS Arlington Heights, village (1990 pop. 75,460), Cook county, NE Ill., a residential suburb of Chicago; founded 1836, inc. 1887. Its manufactures include machinery, drugs and medical equipment, and metal fabrication. Arlington Park racetrack is there. , Ill. -- The IBM PC A PC made by IBM. IBM created the PC industry in 1981 when it introduced its first model with 16KB of RAM. However, it was way off in its estimates, projecting that 250,000 units would be sold in the first five years. In fact, about three million IBM PCs were sold in that period. was announced on August 12, 1981 and became available for sale two months later. Because IBM (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) encouraged other companies to develop IBM-compatible PCs A PC that is compatible with the IBM PC and PS/2 standards. Although this term is still used, it had validity in the early days when PC makers were trying to copy the IBM PC, and many PCs were not compatible. Today, PCs conform to standards set by Intel, Microsoft and the PC industry at large. , it quickly became a standard for the whole PC industry. Compaq introduced the first IBM-compatible PC in January 1983 and over 100 other companies followed in the next decade. In the early 1990s Microsoft wrestled away IBM's leadership of the PC standard and changed it to Windows-compatible PCs. Information about the importance and impact of the IBM PC is available at http://www.futurecomputing.com/All/pubs/8108_billion.aspx. The first market research report, "IBM's Billion Dollar Baby," is available for download at Future Computing's website. This research report was available a few days after IBM's announcement and became a bestseller. The next table shows the 25-year growth of the IBM PC and the industry it created. The data includes 5-year periods for PC unit sales unit sales Sales measured in terms of physical units rather than dollars. Unit sales data are often used by financial analysts when evaluating the health of a company. and PC retail value. The sales started slowly with 5.7M units from 1981 to 1985, which grew to 855M units in the last 5-year period ending August 2006.
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MS-DOS & Windows PC Sales
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USA WW USA WW
Million Units Million Units Value $B Value $B
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1981-1985 3.8 5.7 10.5 16.9
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1986-1990 28.1 60.3 76.4 181
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1991-1995 64.3 172 153 447
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1996-2000 162 444 335 1,010
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2001-8/2006 267 855 424 1,440
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8/1981 to 8/2006 580 1,540 998 3,100
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PCs based on the original IBM PC architecture have sold 580M units in 25 years worth nearly $B 1,000 in the USA. Worldwide sales of MS-DOS MS-DOS in full Microsoft Disk Operating System Operating system for personal computers. MS-DOS was based on DOS, developed in 1980 by Seattle Computer Products. Microsoft Corp. bought the rights to DOS in 1981, and released MS-DOS with IBM's PC that year. and Windows PCs An x86-based computer that runs some version of Windows. See x86 and Windows. since August 1981 have surpassed 1.5B units with a value of $B 3,100. The estimates are from two market research reports by Computer Industry Almanac almanac, originally, a calendar with notations of astronomical and other data. Almanacs have been known in simple form almost since the invention of writing, for they served to record religious feasts, seasonal changes, and the like. . The Worldwide PC report has yearly sales for desktop and mobile PCs for the USA and six regions of the world. The Computers in-use report has PCs in-use estimates for 57 countries, major regions and worldwide. Computer Industry Almanac publishes market research reports for the PC, Smartphone A cellular telephone with information access. It provides digital voice service as well as any combination of e-mail, text messaging, pager, Web access, voice recognition, still and/or video camera, MP3, TV or video player and organizer (see PDA). , and Internet industries. For more information see http://www.c-i-a.com |
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