Influence of The IBM PC On The Personal Computer Market - Domination of The Clones

Domination of The Clones

Within a few years of the introduction of fully compatible IBM PC clones, virtually all the rival business personal computer systems, and alternate x86 using architectures, were gone from the market. Despite the inherent dangers of an industry based on a de facto "standard", a thriving PC clone industry emerged. The only non-IBM PC-compatible systems that remained were those systems that were classified as home computers, such as the Apple II series made by Apple Inc., or business systems that offered features not available on the IBM PC, such as a high level of integration (e.g., bundled accounting and inventory) or fault-tolerance and multitasking and multi-user features.

IBM tried to capture the remaining home-computer market with the IBM PCjr, which they announced in November 1983, but did not ship until March 1984. The PCjr flopped. The remaining home computers, such as the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, and various MSX2 computers remained on the market until IBM PC compatibles gained sufficient multimedia capabilities to compete with home computers. With the advent of inexpensive versions of the VGA video card and the Sound Blaster sound card (and its clones), most of the remaining home computers were driven from the market.

By 1995, almost no new consumer-oriented systems were released that were not IBM PC clones. Commodore's Amiga and Apple's Macintosh remained the competitive holdouts. The Amiga and Macintosh originally used Motorola's 68000 family of processors, later migrating to the PowerPC architecture. Throughout the 1990s Apple would steadily transition the Macintosh platform from proprietary expansion interfaces to use emerging industry standards such as IDE, PCI and USB. In 2002 Amiga Inc and Eyetech made the AmigaOne motherboards, dropping support for Zorro III, Amiga native floppy disks and native Amiga custom chipsets such as AGA which was included in every Amiga since 1985. In 2006, Apple converted the Macintosh to the Intel x86 architecture. Modern Macintosh computers are essentially IBM PC compatibles, capable of booting Microsoft Windows and running most IBM PC-compatible software, but still retain unique design elements that support Apple's Mac OS X operating system. As of 2012 AmigaOS 4 runs still only on the PowerPC architecture.