Buried in a labyrinthine mass of narrow hallways and white-wall offices, in the middle of the largest IBM site in the world, are the modest digs of the man who invented Control+Alt+Delete.
“As I like to joke, I may have invented it, but Microsoft made it popular,” said David Bradley, a white-haired 52-year-old engineer whose spartan office bears few clues about his role in helping build the first IBM Personal Computer.
Pinned to Bradley’s wall is a small embroidery made by his wife to commemorate Aug. 12, 1981, and showing Charlie Chaplin, the icon IBM used to sell the PC as a “tool for modern times.”
Never mind that Chaplin’s 1936 film “Modern Times” was a protest against technology; IBM’s PC shattered the company’s sales projections and signaled a sea change in the way businesses used computers.
If the leafy office park outside Raleigh is the heart of IBM’s PC business, then Bradley is the division’s historian. As one of the few members of the original team of engineers still working at IBM, Bradley is the go-to person for most questions about the beginnings of the PC, which celebrated its 20th anniversary Sunday.
Today, Bradley works on advanced technology projects for the company’s xSeries servers, and is the founder and former manager of IBM’s PC Architecture department.
Back then, Bradley said in an interview, there was no concept that history was being made.
It was 1980 and Microsoft was a 40-person company on the 8th floor of the One National Bank building in Bellevue, Wash. There, a young Bill Gates would lie on the floor rewriting code to make it work with the new PC.
Bradley was 31 and had been working on the Datamaster, a $10,000 computer system aimed at small businesses, when his bosses tapped him to join a small group working on a strange new project: an easy-to-use personal computer that could be manufactured quickly. The team grew to more than 200, but one of the benefits of getting in early was the ability to make lasting contributions, such as Control+Alt+Delete.
As the engineer in charge of the basic input output controls affecting the keyboard, the display and the printer, Bradley wanted to make sure users did not reboot accidentally. He chose three keys, including two that were far apart and yet easy to find, he said.
Bradley, a Purdue University PhD who holds seven patents related to the PC, also helped develop a precursor to Windows that allowed users to scroll one section of their screen while the rest of it remained static.
There were other makers of PCs at the time, but none of IBM’s size and reputation. The excitement, Bradley said, came mostly from working on something the average person could relate to.
“A lot of people at IBM were working on mainframes. It’s hard to point to a mainframe and say that’s the little piece I worked on. We were all just true believers. A lot of us had personal computers, Apple IIs, or Radio Shacks or like me they could have gotten a kit and put it together themselves,” Bradley said.
“Now we were working on something that we were able to show our families. It was nifty and neat and much more personal in that context. I’m glad I was one of the people chosen to work on it and I wouldn’t have passed it up for anything, but I didn’t know that at the time.”
IBM sold about 3 million PCs between 1981 and 1985, dwarfing the company’s original estimates that it would sell 241,683 computers in the same period. In fact, the company later beat that estimate in one month alone, building more than 250,000 PCs in December 1984, Bradley said.
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Down the hall from Bradley is another member of the original team of engineers, Noel Fallwell, who was in charge of the system board layout–the main electronics board.
He keeps an autographed copy of the company’s in-house magazine announcing the new PC, signed by many former employees. In Florida, another team member, Patty McHugh, now works in IBM’s speech recognition unit, Bradley said.
2 decades of upgrades
THE ORIGINAL IBM PC
Price: $2,665
Processor: 4.77 mHz Intel 8088
Memory: 64 kilobytes
Video: 11.5-inch monochrome monitor and display card
Audio: Internal speaker
Hardware: 5.25-inch floppy drive, 83-key keyboard
Software: MS-DOS, Lotus 1-2-3
CURRENT PC MODEL
Dell Dimension 8100
Price: $999
Processor: 1.3 gHz Intel Pentium 4
Memory: 128 megabytes
Video: 15-inch color monitor, TV-capable graphics card
Audio: Sound card with external stereo speakers
Hardware: 20 gigabyte hard drive, rewriteable CD drive, 56k modem, 3.5-inch floppy drive, 104-key keyboard, mouse
Software: Windows Millennium Edition, MS Works 2001
Source: Companies, Computer Museum History Center