I don't think anybody at IBM (or anywhere else) had an idea how successful the PC would eventually become, it needed many happy accidents for that to happen (an

I don't think anybody at IBM (or anywhere else) had an idea how successful the PC would eventually become, it needed many happy accidents for that to happen (and Microsoft was probably more responsible for that success than IBM, the other factor being cheap clones). The original IBM PCs were thoroughly unimpressive, even when compared to much cheaper 8-bit home computers. It was much more likely that the PC would have gone the way of the Dodo like most other computer architectures of that time.