The IBM 5150 was released in 1981. It set the standard for what a personal computer should be. This device didn't end up in many homes, but in the office. The basic model came with 16 kilobytes of RAM, but was upgradeable to 256. It used an Intel 8088 chip for it's processor. The very first of these didn't come with the 5.25 inch disk drive that you see in most photographs. A cassette deck was supposed to be used to load programs. However, IBM quickly moved on to the disk drive with the option of installing two. It came with Microsoft BASIC built-in. When the disk drives became available, so did the Microsoft Disk Operating System better known as PC-DOS. It helped make Microsoft a household name by shipping PC-DOS with most units.
I recall seeing these computers throughout the 1980s and even into the 1990s. In high school, I was enrolled in the computer science program and the computers we used most were IBM 5150 or a variant. (We also had a desktop publishing class that used Apple Macintosh computers.) We were doing BASIC programming, working with dBase and other office applications.
I have fond memories of the IBM PC. It's iconic in it's look and while not the most technologically, it was profound.