IBM COMPUTERS

IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to legally reverse engineer the BIOS through clean room design. Columbia Data Products built the first clone of an IBM personal computer through a clean room implementation of its BIOS. Many early IBM PC compatibles used the same computer bus as the original PC and AT models. The IBM AT compatible bus was later named the ISAbus by manufacturers of compatible computers. The term "IBM PC compatible" is now a historical description only since IBM has withdrawn from personal computer sales.

Descendants of the IBM PC compatibles make up the majority of microcomputers on the market today, although interoperability with the bus structure and peripherals of the original PC architecture may be limited or non-existent.

The origins of this platform came with the decision by IBM in 1980 to market a low-cost single-user computer as quickly as possible in response to Apple Computer'ssuccess in the burgeoning market. On 12 August 1981, the first IBM PC went on sale. There were three operating systems (OS) available for it but the most popular and least expensive was PC DOS, a version of MS DOS licensed from Microsoft. In a crucial concession, IBM's agreement allowed Microsoft to sell its own version,MS-DOS, for non-IBM platforms. The only proprietary component of the PC was the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System).

A number of computers of the time based on the 8086 and 8088 processors were manufactured during this period, but with different architecture to the PC, and which ran under their own versions of DOS and CP/M-86. However, software which addressed the 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. Columbia closely modeled the IBM PC and produced the first "compatible" PC (i.e., more or less compatible to the IBM PC standard) in June 1982 closely followed by Eagle Computer. Compaq Computer Corp. announced its first IBM PC compatible a few months later 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 directly copy the BIOS 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.