5-minute read - by Alison Li, March 6, 2024
Travel back to a time when floppy disks unlocked the digital realms and pixelated adventures on personal computers redefined play.
As we celebrate our 40th anniversary at ASML, we’re honoring pioneering electronic devices and the tiny silicon brains that powered them. They first entered many people’s daily lives in the 1980s, the era that saw microchips transform from industrial components to the heartbeats of home computing. Read on to find out how the IBM PC ignited the home computing revolution, the Commodore Amiga opened up new frontiers in computer graphics, and the Yamaha DX7 brought a new wave of music production that still echoes today.
IBM released its first personal computer in 1981, called the IBM PC. After witnessing the growing market interest in personal computers, the company embarked on an ambitious project to create a computer that was affordable, user-friendly and versatile. The result? A game-changing innovation that’s widely recognized for popularizing the term 'PC' today.
One factor that cemented the IBM PC’s status as the standard for personal computing was its open architecture. While its competitors produced their own proprietary systems, IBM chose to make the technical specifications of its PC available to the public.
