Happy Birthday, IBM PC! 30 today!

And haven't you done well? A lot better than MS-DOS did, anyway...

I measure that by your legacy. This netbook I'm typing on - and my desktop machine - are still shaped by decisions in your design. From the CPU's ISA to the I/O systems to the fact that the keyboard has a Scroll Lock key on it...
Oh, wait, my netbook doesn't have a Scroll Lock key on it. But it does have Sys Rq, which I think I used once many years ago on a 286 machine.

If anyone knows of a modern use for Sys Rq, I'd like to hear it.

Anyway, the point is that the only real "design point" from MS-DOS that survives 30 years on is that Windows still assumes, as DOS did, that the first hard disk is C: and that A: and B: are floppy disks.
That's about it.

Whereas the IBM Compatible PC has evolved to a point where it shares no hardware with the original IBM PC, except possibly a serial port here or a keyboard controller chip there. Yet that original design still informs, guides and even restricts the current generation of "PCs".

So, here's to the modern PC - the which shares his grandfather's features.