August 1981 - August 12, 1981 (Wednesday)

August 12, 1981 (Wednesday)

• The IBM PC was introduced at a press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, and with it MS-DOS software owned by Microsoft. Though the product of International Business Machines personal computer was not the first desktop, it was the most first designed for the ordinary user to use. The original IBM PC had 16 kilobytes of random access memory and a base price of $1,565. In the first four months, 35,000 were sold, and by the end of 1982, more than 800,000 had been purchased.
• Born: Djibril Cissé, French footballer, in Arles