basic input / output system was the processor released in the first ibm pc.
basic input / output system was the processor released in the first ibm pc.
which processor was released in the first ibm pc?
basic input / output system
early after the launch of the ibm pc in 1981, there were still dozens of systems that were not ibm pc-compatible, but did use intel x86 chips. they used intel 8088, 8086, or 80186 processors, and almost without exception offered an oem version of ms-dos (as opposed to the oem version customized for ibm's use). however, they generally made no attempt to copy the ibm pc's architecture, so these machines had different i/o addresses, a different system bus, different video controllers, and other differences from the original ibm pc. these differences, which were sometimes rather minor, were used to improve upon the ibm pc's design, but as a result of the differences, software that directly manipulated the hardware would not run correctly. in most cases, the x86-based systems that didn't use a fully ibm pc compatible design didn't sell well enough to attract support from software manufacturers, though a few computer manufacturers arranged for compatible versions of popular applications to be developed and sold specifically for their machines.
influence of the ibm pc on the personal computer market
by june 1983 "pc magazine" defined "pc 'clone'" as "a computer [that can] accommodate the user who takes a disk home from an ibm pc, walks across the room, and plugs it into the 'foreign' machine". because of a shortage of ibm pcs that year, many customers purchased clones instead. columbia data products produced the first computer more or less compatible with the ibm pc standard during june 1982, soon followed by eagle computer. compaq 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.
ibm pc compatible