Technology History | National Museum of American History — The Turbo PC Came Back Out of an Attic

There is a beige box on the first floor of this museum that spent years in a bin bag in a roof space in Ashe County, North Carolina.

It is a PC's Limited Turbo PC, made in 1985, and it is the machine Dell built when it stopped reselling other people's designs and started drawing its own.

The museum's catalogue entry describes the specification of the model: an Intel 8088, 640 kilobytes of memory, a 360-kilobyte drive, a 130-watt supply, eight expansion slots.

None of that was remarkable in 1985.

The selling point recorded alongside it was the ordering, not the electronics — a buyer telephoned and chose the components, and the machine was assembled to that order, which is why the company could keep so little stock.

This particular unit was sold to Clint Johnson, a freelance writer, who kept it long after it stopped being useful.

In 2005 he traded it back to Dell for a new computer, and in 2007 Dell gave it to the Smithsonian, together with Michael Dell's employee badge, at a ceremony in May of that year.

The same body of Dell material includes an invoice dated 19 December 1985, made out to a Red Lobster restaurant in Orlando and marked customer 100.

That is the sort of buyer a mail-order clone builder had in its second year: one branch of a restaurant chain, ordering a single machine.

The computer is catalogued as 2007.0042.01 and is on view in the American Enterprise exhibition, 1 West, in the Mars Hall of American Business, in the same collection as an Altair, a first-generation IBM PC and an original Macintosh.

Admission is free and the museum opens daily except 25 December.

The photograph here is a different Turbo PC of the same model, not the museum's unit, which is displayed with an Amdek amber monitor on top of it.

Photo: Ruben de Rijcke, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.