A closer look

The machine that launched the global PC revolution was profoundly weak by today's standards. The 1981 IBM PC base model came with a pathetic 16 kilobytes of RAM. To put that in perspective, a single low-resolution JPEG meme you send to a friend requires about three to four times that amount of memory. People ran entire accounting departments on a machine that would spontaneously combust if it tried to load a modern web browser.