Columbia PC: Anything IBM can do...

This is an advert for a hugely-significant machine in the history of the microcomputer - in particular that of the modern PC, in the IBM sense.

It's for Columbia Data Products' PC - the first legal IBM 5150 clone.

IBM's 5150 PC was something of a panicked response to the explosion of the microcomputer market in the late 1970s and early 80s. Because of time pressures, the design team at IBM's Boca Raton facility decided to use off-the-shelf parts to build its new micro.

The only thing proprietary about it was the machine's BIOS - the built-in system that enabled the computer to start up and access all its hardware. IBM considered this to be fairly uncopyable and so it saw no issue in publishing the specs so that third party companies could build add-in cards.

[picture: Columbia_pc_byte_jan83.webp|A US advert for Columbia Data Products' "new Multi-Personal Computer", from Byte magazine, January 1981]

As soon as the 5150 was released in 1981, other companies saw the flaw in this plan, and the race was on to clone it. Columbia Data Products was the first to do so - using a clean-room implementation of the IBM BIOS, so it was legally safe.

Not only that, but as a clone it was much better than the 5150. It had more memory, more expansion slots and provided things like parallel and serial ports that were extras on the IBM. 

This set the pattern for the next 20 or so years: IBM would release something relatively pedestrian, but that was, er, IBM, so banks and corporates would buy it, and then cloners would make better and cheaper versions that everyone else actually bought.

What's also telling is that the IBM 5150 didn't reach the UK until the spring of 1983, whilst the Columbia PC launched in the US in June 1982 and was already being shipped into the UK in quantities large enough to advertise just a few months later, beating the IBM itself by several months.

[picture: Columbia_commander_prac_feb82.webp|An advert from Columbia's UK importer Icarus for Columbia's Commander micros, as well as multi-user multi-processor machines. From PRAC, February 1982]

Columbia had been founded by William Diaz in 1975 in order to build industrial microcomputers[source: "Columbia Data ready to launch its first public stock offering", Washington Post, December 5th 1983].

By 1980, it was producing a range of Z80-based micros, including the Commander series, which featured three models including one with Tektronix - a CAD workstation - emulation. 

There was also a range of multi-user multi-processor systems in the emerging style at the time where each user - up to 16 in this case - had their own micro on a board in a host machine and connected to it with a terminal.

However, despite its head start with the Columbia PC - also known as the MPC 1600 - Columbia didn't survive for very long in the cut-throat world of the IBM clone where margins were almost non-existant and more and more manufacturers piled in on an almost-daily basis. 

The company filed for Chapter 11 bankrupty in May 1985, although after restructuring it continued as a software company which still exists as of 2026[source: https://www.cdpi.com/]. 

Meanwhile, its remaining stock was still appearing in specialist second-hand or defunct-computer retailers into the following year, with examples of the Columbia PC retailing for $1,200 - half its original cost - in the spring of 1986[source: Bargain hunting, David Ahl, PCW, June 1986, p. 86].