Technology History | Boca Raton — $1,565 Did Not Include a Disk Drive

The campus markets itself as the birthplace of the first personal computer, which is not what happened here. Altair, Apple, Commodore and Tandy had all sold personal computers before IBM's arrived, and IBM had already sold a small machine of its own, the 5100, back in 1975. What was built at Boca Raton over about a year was something narrower and more consequential: the machine everyone else copied. William Lowe ran IBM's laboratory here, and in 1980 he pitched chairman Frank Cary on a computer for small businesses and ordinary buyers. Cary gave him a month to show a prototype and a year to deliver a product. Lowe was promoted away that autumn, and the project, code-named Chess, passed to Don Estridge and the twelve engineers later nicknamed the Dirty Dozen. Then they did the thing IBM did not do. They bought the parts outside the company, took the processor from Intel and the operating system from Microsoft, and published a technical reference containing the circuit designs. That decision is why an IBM-compatible industry exists, and also why IBM did not get to keep it. Estridge announced the result on 12 August 1981 at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, a thousand miles from the building where it was designed. The price everybody quotes is $1,565, and it is nearly always quoted wrong. By IBM's own account, that figure bought 16 kilobytes of memory and no disk drive at all; a display, two diskette drives and a printer added almost $3,000 more. The 5150 in the second photograph, with its monitor and its pair of floppy drives, is a machine that cost close to three times the famous number. IBM sold the property in 1996. The Marcel Breuer and Robert Gatje buildings are still standing, precast concrete with deep angled window hoods, designed for the Florida sun and for hurricanes, and the site trades today as the Boca Raton Innovation Campus at 5000 T-Rex Avenue. The Palm Beach Post reported in 2026 that the campus holds no historic designation from either the city of Boca Raton or the National Register. Nothing legally protects the place where the personal computer industry got its standard. Sources: IBM Heritage; IEEE Spectrum; Palm Beach Post; Boca Raton Innovation Campus. Photos: Phillip Pessar, CC BY 2.0, and Ruben de Rijcke, CC BY-SA 3.0, both via Wikimedia Commons.