This is true. You had an IBM or an IBM compatible PC running DOS and then Windows. I was well aware of IBM at a young age.
How many times was that phrase used in computer magazines? I kind of forgot about it, this thread has brought me back to the days I would sift through computer magazines at book stores.
Remember when IBM tech powered every popular video game console? Not long ago. I thought having POWER machines for gaming was very cool. It didn't worked out for some reason.
I dunno. I thought it worked out pretty well...it just didn't last into subsequent generations. But then, in gaming consoles, up until the current fad of "meh...just make it a PC", every generation of console was, architecturally speaking, new territory.
yeah, in my early youth "IBM" or "IBM Compatible" (for the value shoppers out there, such as my family) was very much a household name...if your household had a computer at all, that is.
IBM was synonymous with COMPUTERS for quite some time.
Those PC ads featuring a Charlie Chaplin lookalike was well known.
At a time when pc weren't household items, that came about quite later
PC's were big in the 80s, and 'PC' meant IBM PC (or clone). The rest of us had 'commodore's or 'atari's - we didn't have 'pc's. It was also the heyday of computer magazine's from PC shopper to DDJ and Compute! Computers weren't as unknown back then as people like to think..
So I'd argue IBM was a household name as far back as the mid-80s.
Much longer ago than that. I'm quite certain that long before there even was an IBM PC and almost certainly before I touched an IBM Selectric, I would have known IBM as a computer company. If someone in the 1960s had been asked to name a computer company, they would have named IBM and I'm not talking about nerdy niche audiences.
It even overlapped with the period AOL was a thing. Unless you’re suggesting that wasn’t a household name, either.