IBM PC Inventor Mark Dean: 'The PC-era Is Over'

Although in the late 1970s the Apple II, Commodore Pet and Atari 800 all came before IBM's Model 5150, the company celebrated 30 years of PC-compatible hardware and software offerings Friday.

In June, IBM, which was founded in 1911 as a computing tabulating recording corporation, turned 100.

"They're going the way of the vacuum tube, typewriter, vinyl records, CRT and incandescent light bulbs," writes Mark Dean, IBM's Middle East and Africa CTO, in a company blog post.

Fortune ranked IBM as the 18th largest company in the U.S. earlier this year.

"When I helped design the PC," Dean wrote, "I didn't think I'd live long enough to witness its decline. But, while PCs will continue to be much-used devices, they're no longer at the leading edge of computing."

IBM's Model 5150, which supported only 40 characters, 16 colors, 160KB floppies and a joystick port, was introduced to the world on Aug. 12, 1981 as a personal computer.

The model 5150 was designed for business, school and home use, and at the time, cost $1,265, not including a monitor, serial or parallel ports or hard disk.

See how IBM launched a PC revolution more than 30 years ago: