In 1979 IBM's Boca Raton research group started designing and developing a "Personal Computer" intended for business and the home using largley off-the-shelf parts, an open architecture (meaning anyone could develop for it), and was "reasonably" priced (if you call $3000 in 1981 bucks "reasonable"). The result was the IBM Personal Computer model 5150 aka IBM PC 5150, which was released in August 1981, and through a bluff by newcomers to the industry, Microsoft, managed to create the holy pairing of Microsoft and Intel-based PCs that has continued for the past 40+ years.

The thing you have to understand, is the IBM PC was a BUSINESS machine first. So these things were intiially designed for showing spreadsheets, writing letters, telnetting into the network mainframe from home, and checking stocks on a BBS - not playing games.

1981-1986 - The first Wave - The earliest machines were the 8088 and 286 based machines (and their 8086/80186 based counterparts. IBM Spearheaded ALL of these "Generations" of PC, knwon by the acronym used on the IBM Model sthat started it. The IBM PC/XT era was where we began, with pokey little 16-bit Intel 8086 CPUs in cost-reduced 8088 versions, running at a pokey 4.77MHz, up to about 10MHz for a very fast late model as these were still made as late as 1990. Most PC games of that time were either black and white/monochrome using the ROM Characters (spades, happy faces, asterisks, menu edges) for rudimentary "graphics", text adventures that did not need ANY Graphics, or the occasional "CGA" game with some lovely 4-color pallets such as Cyan/White/Magenta/Black, or Red/Green/Brown/Black. Mopst fo these games were either home made or major release approximations of either the games found on mainframes (ie Microsoft Adventure - aka - Colassal Cave), or Arcade games. All sound was pushed through a rinky dink single-channel beeper speaker, uneless you had the later IBM PC Junior or Tandy 1000-series machines in this class (Tandy 1000/A/HD/SX/EX) which had an enhanced 3 voice sound chip and some pecularities of their own that can make QOL a little, uh, difficult to some. In 1984, he IBM PC AT came out - the 286 class, but they were rougly the same as the 8088 machines that came before, just a little bit faster, and some oddball design flaws that made devs not want to continue developing for them longer than they had to. And the EGA graphics basically released with the 286 - an affair that allowed resolutions as high as 640x200p at 16 colors, with 320x200 16-color graphics being the most popular. These soldiered on as late as 1991.

1986-1989 - The Second Wave - The second wave was the 386. In 1986, Intel released their 80386 microprocessor, and who was the first company to have one in their commercially available system - not IBM - it was Compaq, in their astronomically expensive power workstation, the Deskpro 386! Of course IBM and everyone else followed suit and the 386, with it's raw power at the time, ushered in the "golden age of DOS gaming". ALL of the legendary DOS games came out when the 386 could still be had new on a shelf of any computer shop pretty much: Leisure Suit Larry, Kings Quest, Space Quest, Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island, Zak McKraken, Ultimas V, VI, and VII, Wolfenstein 3D, Populous, Civilization, Battle Chess, Car & Driver, Links 386, Falcon 4.0, Microsoft Flight Simulator 3.0 and 4.0....the 386 is where the gaming really got good....then we get to the 3rd wave...

1989-1995 - The third Wave - the mighty 486! - The Intel 486 was released in 1989, and was sort of like the IBM PC's "Teen years". Between 1989 and 1995, the IBM Compatible Personal computer went from a office-based workstation that your father or mother had and let you play games on, most likely without a mouse, or sound, or SVGA - to by the end of it's commercial life, when Windows 95 came out in 1995, a budget powerhouse Multimedia Workstation with a CD-ROM, SVGA up to 800x600p, true color graphics, stereo sound via a SoundBlaster compatible sound card, and of course, could run some of the newest games decently enough to enjoy them, such as Diablo and Duke Nukem 3D. AS such, the 486 had a pretty wild growth spurt, with the earliest machines just being "Fast 386s" all the way to by the end, we had 3 different bus types (EISA, PCI, and VLB), new 72 pin sIMM RAM up to 128MB on some motherboards already, Hard Disks over the 528MB limit, plug n' play BIOS that could automatically find hard drives and assign IRQ and Memory address lines like modern computers do today - you could say, the 486 is what brought the PC up to speed as a serious work and play machine for all, rather than a niche STEM field office product for people who need to do calcuations or work with huge databases of information.

1995-2001 - The fourth wave - All about the Pentiums - The Pentium I, II, III, are where the homogenization and dropping of brands began for the IBM PC Compatible. Now it was just called a "PC", and since Windows 95, a "PC" Ran Microsoft WIndows. The internet was the future, and it was a new place full of content creators with passion more than finances in mind. Gaming started to move into the 3D Realm with things like Tomb Raider, lots of simulators like Midtown Madness or Diablo II. By the end of it, things like Skyrim and Halo were becoming rather popular. Then we enter the fith wave - where the PC loses it's soul....

2001-2013 - The Fifth Wave - The PC Starts to Lose it's soul - Between 2001 and 2013, the PC landscame changed in a big way. First off, they started to be seen as consumer machines more than as "Tools" for the affluent or STEM field needy. Windows XP introduced Digital Rights Management as new things on the internet such as Emulation, ROMS, and Napster introduced a whole pile of legal issues with sharing data and Intellectual Property over the Internet. Gaming started to scoot away from distinct genres with distinct gameplay, and now the focus was on putting lots of windows (the glass panel, not the operating system - though that was on the computer too) on your PC, lots of crazy blue neon lights, and having a case dolled up like some kind of Anime Gothic Easter Egg motif - playing games with super expensive, faster, Graphics Processing Units (GPU) cards for more "Realism" in what was mostly a sea of first-person shooters based on Doom that defined them in 1993 years earlier - on 486 era hardware - so started the modern world of upgrading your GPU every three years, system requirements becoming less relevant, copy protection in the form of CD's or internet connectivity becoming a popular gripe, and early attempts at Internet based distribution such as that unholy nightmare called "Softwrap".

2013-present - the Sixth Wave - The PC Is starting to Die - Starting in 2013, was when we saw the PC struggle, along side the Apple machines, to maintain some form of "popularity"- because now we all carried a "supercomputer" in our pockets - the Smartphone, so not all of us really NEEDED a computer anymore. We could surf anywhere, any time, and play games antime we liked, on these little touch screen computers in our pockets. So to keep milling money off aging computers that were still not too slow to do basic work or enjoy a game or two here or there, they started including stupid gimmicks like USB connectable docking stations, and touch screens, to make the populace go "ooh, new and shiny thing, I want thaaaat!". Sadly, that did not work. To add to it, the sloppiness of releases by AAA game manufacturers, and the proliferation of the "Anyone can sell a game" platform STEAM, started opening the doors to people who would not have been given a second look. The most famous being Christian Animator and usuall-child-friendly game Developer Scott Cawthon and his famous "Five Nights at Freddy's" game series that put indie horror games on the map! What makes Freddy's stand out is that for once, a computer game could be played on a 15 year old Pentium IV with a small memory upgrade and stock Intel graphics! Temporarily shifting the materialistic lunacy away from GPUs and Blue LEDs and more towards making use of what you had for awhile. But as the sixth wave continues into 2024, people are becoming increasingly angry with Microsoft and their B.S. with Windows 11, leading to more and more people moving to Linux in recent years (myself included). Also added to it is the shit quality hardware from a regular store (I buy 3rd hand Enterprise level hardwarE), the loss of things that kept the PC IBM Compatible all this time (no more regular BIOS, now we have UEFI, no more IDE Drives and FAT/NTFS filesystems, now we have GPT partition tables unreadable by anything made before 2009).