IBM enters the PC market: the 5150 debuts at $1,565

For two years, Apple, Tandy, and Commodore had carved up a computer market growing 40 percent annually while IBM had stayed out of the small business machine market. On August 12, 1981, at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, IBM introduced the Personal Computer, model 5150, priced at $1,565 with an Intel 8088 processor and Microsoft's MS-DOS. Deliveries were set for October. One analyst had compared the effort to teaching an elephant to tap dance…