Origins
IBM decided in 1980 to market a low-cost single-user computer as quickly as possible in response to Apple Computer's success in the burgeoning microcomputer market. On 12 August 1981, the first IBM PC went on sale. There were three operating systems (OS) available for it. The least expensive and most popular was PC DOS made by Microsoft. In a crucial concession, IBM's agreement allowed Microsoft to sell its own version, MS-DOS, for non-IBM computers. The only proprietary component of the original PC architecture was the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System).
A number of computers based on the 8086 and 8088 processors were manufactured during this period, but with different architecture from the IBM PC, and with their own versions of DOS and CP/M-86. Software which addressed the computer hardware directly instead of making standard calls to MS-DOS was faster. This was particularly relevant to games. The IBM PC was sold in high enough volumes to justify writing software specifically for it, and this encouraged other manufacturers to produce machines which could use the same programs, expansion cards and peripherals as the PC. The 808x computer marketplace rapidly excluded all machines which were not functionally very similar to the PC. The 640 kB barrier on "conventional" system memory available to MS-DOS is a legacy of that period; other non-clone machines did not have this limit.
The original "clones" of the IBM Personal Computer were created without IBM's participation or approval. The Columbia company closely modeled the IBM PC and produced the first "compatible" PC (more or less compatible to the IBM PC standard) during June 1982, soon followed by Eagle Computer. Compaq Computer Corp. announced its first IBM PC compatible in November 1982—- the Compaq Portable. The Compaq was the first sewing machine-sized portable computer that was essentially 100% PC-compatible. The company could not copy the BIOS directly as a result of the court decision in Apple v. Franklin, but it could reverse-engineer the IBM BIOS and then write its own BIOS using clean room design.
Read more about this topic: IBM PC Compatible
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)