IBM PC compatible
|
The Columbia MPC was one of the many IBM PC compatibles that flooded the US market. |
IBM PC compatible is a class of
computers which make up the vast majority of small computers (
microcomputers) on the market today. They are based on the
IBM PC design originated by . They use the
Intel x86 architecture (or an architecture made to emulate it). Such computers used to be referred to as
PC clones, though from the early 1990's on this has been contracted to simply
PC.
The original clones of the IBM PC were created without IBM's participation or approval. As the market evolved however, IBM derived a considerable income stream from licence fees — companies who cloned the PC paid for licences to use IBM patents that were in the PC design, to the extent that IBM's focus changed from discouraging PC clones to maximising its revenue from licence sales.
Most modern
x86 server-class machines are essentially more robust versions of the modern desktop IBM PC compatible.
Origins
 |
The original IBM PC (Model 5150) motivated the production of clones in the early-1980s. |
The origins of this
platform came with the decision by IBM in
1980 to market a
personal computer as quickly as possible in response to
Apple Computer's rapid success in the burgeoning market for low-cost single-user computersâ€"what later came to be known as the "personal computer market." On 12 August
1981, the first
IBM-PC went on sale. There were several
operating systems (OS) available for it but the best remembered is DOS (the cheapest). IBM licensed DOS from
Microsoft; IBM's version was called
PC-DOS and was sold as an "add-on" to the IBM PC. In a crucial concession almost unnoticed by either party at the time, IBM's agreement also allowed
Microsoft to sell its version,
MS-DOS, for non-IBM platforms. Also, in creating the platform, IBM used only one proprietary component: the
BIOS (Basic Input/Output System).
Columbia copied the IBM PC and produced the first 'compatible' (i.e., more or less compatible to the IBM PC standard) PC in
1982.
Compaq Computer Corp. produced its first IBM PC compatible a few months later in
1982â€"the
Compaq Portable. The Compaq was not only the first "sewing machine-sized"
portable PC but, even more important, was the first essentially 100% PC-compatible computer. 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. Compaq became a very successful PC manufacturer, but was bought out by
Hewlett-Packard in
2002.
Compatibility issues
Simultaneously, many manufacturers such as
Xerox,
Digital,
Sanyo, and
Wang introduced personal computers that were not completely hardware-compatible with the IBM PC. While such decisions seem foolish in retrospect, it is not always appreciated just how fast the rise of the IBM clone market was, and the degree to which it took the industry by surprise.
Microsoft's intention, and the mindset of the industry from
1981 to as late as the mid-
1980s, was that application writers would write to the
Application programming interfaces (or APIs) in MS-DOS, and in some cases to the firmware BIOS, and that these components would form what would now be called a
hardware abstraction layer. Each computer would have its own
Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) version of MS-DOS, customized to its hardware. Any piece of software written for MS-DOS would run on any MS-DOS computer, regardless of variations in hardware design.
This expectation seemed reasonable, in the light of the computer marketplace as it existed then. At that time, Microsoft was primarily focused on computer languages, such as
BASIC. The established model for small system operating software was
CP/M from Digital Research, which was in use both at the hobbyist level and at the more professional end of the microcomputer spectrum. To achieve this spectrum of use, the OS had to operate across a range of machines that had widely varying hardware, though all based on the 8080 architecture. Microsoft's competing OS was initially targeted to run on a similar varied spectrum of hardware, though all based on the 8086 architecture.
During this time MS-DOS was sold only as an OEM product. There was no Microsoft-branded MS-DOS, MS-DOS could not be purchased directly from Microsoft, and the manual's cover had the corporate color and logo of the PC vendor. Bugs were to be reported to the OEM, not to Microsoft. However, in the case of the clones, it soon became clear that the OEM versions of MS-DOS were virtually identical, except perhaps for the provision of a few utility programs.
MS-DOS provided adequate support for character-oriented applications, such as those that could have been implemented on a minicomputer and a Digital
VT100 terminal. Had the bulk of commercially important software fallen within these bounds, hardware compatibility might not have mattered. However, very early in the development of the PC, its applications evolved beyond the simple terminal applications that MS-DOS supported directly.
Spreadsheets,
WYSIWYG Word processors,
presentation software and
remote communication software established new markets that exploited the PC's strengths, but required capabilities beyond what MS-DOS provided. Thus, from very early in the development of the MS-DOS software environment, many significant pieces of popular commercial software wrote directly to the hardware, for a variety of reasons:
*Communications software directly accessed the
UART chip, because the MS-DOS API and the BIOS did not provide full support for the chip's capabilities.
*Graphics capability was not taken seriously in the original IBM design brief. It was considered to be an exotic or novelty function. MS-DOS didn't have an API for graphics, and the BIOS only included the most rudimentary of graphics functions (such as changing screen modes and plotting single points); having to make a BIOS call for every point drawn or modified also increased overhead considerably, making the BIOS interface notoriously slow. Because of this,
line-drawing, arc-drawing, and
blitting had to be performed by the application to achieve acceptable speed; this was usually done by bypassing the BIOS and accessing video memory directly.
*Games, even early ones, mostly required a true graphics mode. They also performed any machine-dependent trick the programmers could think of in order to gain speed. Though initially the major market for the PC was for business applications, games capability became an important factor in driving PC purchases as PC prices fell.
*Even for standard business applications, speed of execution was a significant competitive advantage. This was shown dramatically by
Lotus 1-2-3's competitive knockout of rival
Context MBA [ Lotus 1-2-3 and Context MBA belonged to a now-mostly-forgotten genre known as "integrated software", today exemplified by Microsoft Works and AppleWorks. Before GUIs, user interfaces were mediated mostly by command keys, and every program had a unique user interface, making it difficult for a user to master more than one or two programs. And the lack of hard disk drives made programs slow to launch, making it inconvenient to use more than one program to accomplish a task. In response to this, monolithic multifunction "integrated" packages arose. Lotus 1-2-3 was built as a three-function "integrated" program: spreadsheet, database, and chart-making. Context MBA included these functions plus a spreadsheet and terminal emulator, the same five functions to be included years later in Lotus Symphony ]. The latter, now almost forgotten, preceded Lotus to market, included more functions, was written in
Pascal, and was highly portable. It was also too slow to be really usable on a PC. Lotus was written in pure assembly language and performed some machine-dependent tricks. It was so much faster that Context MBA was dead as soon as Lotus arrived.
*Disk copy-protection schemes, popular at the time, worked by reading nonstandard data patterns on the diskette to verify originality. These patterns were difficult or impossible to detect using standard DOS or BIOS calls, so direct access to the disk controller hardware was necessary for the protection to work.
At first, other than Compaq's models, few "compatibles" really lived up to their claim. "95% compatibility" was seen as excellent. Reviewers and users developed suites of programs to test compatibility, generally including Lotus 1-2-3 and
Microsoft Flight Simulator, the two most popular "stress tests." Gradually vendors discovered not only how to emulate the IBM BIOS, but the places where they needed to use identical hardware chips to perform key functions within the system. Eventually, the
Phoenix BIOS and similar commercially-available products permitted computer makers to build essentially 100%-compatible clones without having to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS themselves.
Meanwhile, IBM damaged its own franchise by failing to appreciate the importance of "IBM compatibility", when they introduced products such as the
IBM Portable (essentially a
Compaq Portable knockoff), and later the
PCjr, which had significant incompatibilities with the mainline PCs. By the mid-to-late 1980s, buyers began to regard PCs as commodity items, and became skeptical as to whether the security blanket of the IBM name warranted the price differential. Meanwhile, the incompatible Xeroxes and Digitals and Wangs were left in the dust. Nobody cared that they ran MS-DOS; the issue was that they did not run off-the-shelf software written for the IBM PC and true compatibles.
The declining influence of IBM
Since 1981, IBM PC compatibles have grown to dominate both the home and
business markets of commodity computers, with the only notable alternative architecture being the
Apple Macintosh computers, which have a market share of only a few percent. (Even Apple seem to have bowed to the inevitable, and the Apple line is moving to a hardware architecture derived from the PC.) However, IBM itself lost the leadership role in the market for IBM PC compatibles at least fifteen years before its complete withdrawal from the PC market in April 2005. Three events in retrospect are likely turning points:
*Compaq beating IBM to the market in 1986 with the first
80386-based PC.
*IBM's 1987 introduction of incompatible technologies, such as its proprietary
MicroChannel Architecture (MCA)
computer bus, in its
PS/2 line.
*The 1988 introduction by the "
Gang of Nine" companies of a rival
Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA) bus aimed at toppling, rather than copying, MCA.
Dell and
Hewlett-Packard hold the largest shares of the PC market in North America. They are also successful overseas, with
Acer,
Lenovo, and
Toshiba also notable. Worldwide though a huge number of PC's are "
white box" systems assembled by a myriad of local systems builders. Despite advances in computer
technology, all current IBM PC compatibles remain very much compatible with the original IBM PC computers, although most of the components implement the compatibility in special
backward compatibility modes used only during a
system boot.
Expandability
One of the strengths of the PC compatible platform is its modular hardware design. This meant that if a component became obsolete, only an individual component had to be upgraded and not the whole computer as was the case with many of the
microcomputers of the time. As long as applications used operating system calls and did not write to the hardware directly, the existing applications would work. However, MS-DOS (the dominant operating system of the time) did not have support for many calls for multimedia-hardware, and the BIOS was also inadequate. Various attempts to standardise the interfaces were made, but in practice, many of these attempts were either flawed or ignored. Even so, there were many expansion options, and the PC compatible platform advanced much faster than other competing platforms of the time.
"IBM PC Compatible" becomes "Wintel"
In the 1990s, IBM's influence on PC architecture became increasingly irrelevant. Instead of focusing on staying compatible with the IBM PC, vendors began to focus on compatibility with the evolution of
Microsoft Windows. No vendor dares to be incompatible with the latest version of Windows, and Microsoft's annual
WinHEC conferences provide a setting in which Microsoft can lobby for and in some cases dictate the pace and direction of the
hardware side of the PC industry. Microsoft and Windows has become so important to the ongoing development of the PC hardware that industry writers have taken to using the term "Wintel architecture" ("
Wintel" being a
portmanteau combination of "Windows" and "Intel") to refer to the combined hardware-software platform. This terminology itself is becoming a misnomer though as Intel has lost absolute control of the direction of the development of this hardware platform as
AMD has become a major player, and at least for the higher end server versions of PC hardware Linux compatibility has become a factor.
Entertainment software
The original IBM PC was not designed with games as its primary focus. Although color graphics adapters and joystick adapters were available from the beginning, the more widely-adapted monochrome adapter and simple sound capabilities made it unsuitable for multimedia applications such as entertainment. It was also priced as a business computer (its primary design focus), well outside of the entertainment market.
The games that
were available for the dawn of the PC used the real strength of the machine, 16-bit processing at a faster clock speed, to overcome the lack of multimedia capabilities. One of the most impressive titles for the machine, available less than a year after launch, was
Microsoft Flight Simulator. Although Flight Simulator was available for other platforms, it ran at a faster framerate and with more detail on the PC.
As the technology of the PC advanced, more advanced games were developed. As early as 1988,
VGA cards were available for PC clones. These offered 256-colour graphics out of a
palette of 262,144. Also in 1988, sound cards such as the
Adlib and
Creative Music System (precursor to the
Sound Blaster) were available. These developments brought the PC up to a sufficient level such that it could support arcade games ported to the platform as well as other home computers of the time. Another advantage was that many consumers opted to equip their PCs with a hard drive, whilst relatively few home computer platforms were so equipped. This allowed PC games to be more ambitious in their use of resources, and made playing games faster and more convenient.
By 1990, the PC had comparable hardware to competing entertainment platforms of the time, such as the
Commodore Amiga, but was still was not taken "seriously" as a games machine. This could have been caused by the higher price, or that the hardware was very awkward to program for, and required the development of different drivers for all the multimedia hardware options available to the consumer. As before, the PC's main strength was used as leverage, and this led to impressive 3D or pseudo-3D titles such as
Wing Commander,
Ultima Underworld,
Stunts,
Wolfenstein 3D and of course the subsequent
Doom. Doom in particular had the most wide-spread success, with awareness crossing over into mainstream media.
Design limitations and more compatibility issues
Although the IBM PC was designed for expandability, the designers could not anticipate the hardware developments of the '80s. To make things worse, IBM's choice of the
Intel 8088 for the CPU introduced several limitations which were hurdles for developing software for the PC compatible platform. One example was the DOS
640 kB barrier (memory below 640 kB is known as
conventional memory). This was due to the 20-bit memory
addressing space of the 8088. In order to expand
PCs beyond one megabyte, Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft jointly created
EMS, a scheme to allow access to additional memory provided by add-in hardware, available via a 64 kB "window" inside the 20-bit addressing. Later Intel CPUs had larger address spaces and could directly address 16 MB (80286) or more, leading Microsoft to develop an additional specification that did not require additional hardware,
XMS. EMS and XMS have incompatible interfaces, so anyone writing software that used more than one megabyte had to support both systems for the most compatibility.
Graphics cards suffered from their own incompatibilities. Once graphics cards advanced to
SVGA level, the standard for accessing them was no longer clear. At the time, PC programming involved using a
memory model that had 64 kB
memory segments. The most common
VGA graphics mode's
screen memory fit into a single memory segment. SVGA modes required more memory, so accessing the full screen memory was tricky. Each manufacturer developed their own ways of accessing the screen-memory, even going so far as to not number the modes consistently. An attempt at creating a standard called
VESA was made, but not all manufacturers adhered to it.
Due to the wide number of third-party adapters for the PC and no standard for interfacing with them, programming the PC could be difficult. When developing for the PC, a large test-suite of various hardware combinations was needed to make sure the software was compatible with as many PC configurations as possible. Even the PC itself had no clear application interface to the flat memory model the 386 and higher could provide in protected mode. Eventually, some new memory-model APIs were developed,
VCPI and
DPMI, the latter becoming the most popular.
Meanwhile, consumers were overwhelmed by the many different combinations of hardware on offer. To give the consumer some idea of what sort of
PC would be needed to run a given piece of software, the
Multimedia PC standard (or MPC) was set in
1990. It meant that a PC that met the minimum MPC standard could be considered an MPC. Software that could run on a minimalistic MPC-compliant PC would be guaranteed to run on any MPC. The MPC level 2 and MPC level 3 standards were later set, but the term "MPC compliant" never caught on. After MPC level 3 in
1996, no further
MPC standards were set.
The rise of Windows
Microsoft announced
Windows 1.0 in November 1983, but was unable to release it until 1985, and even then it was unsuccessful. The same thing happened in 1987 with the launch of
Windows 2.0; followed by the launch of
Windows/286 and
Windows/386 in
1988.
Perhaps due to these early versions of Windows' lack of success is what convinced IBM and Microsoft to collaborate to produce their version of the future with
OS/2 in 1987 (it was launched with IBM's
PS/2). At the launch Bill Gates is quoted as saying "DOS is dead." OS/2 had been written from scratch by Microsoft and IBM (with IBM taking the lion's share) and was considered superior to the DOS-based Microsoft Windows.
However, OS/2 had a problem - it was written specifically for the 80286 processor. The 80386 had been launched the year before and, according to Intel Chairman
Gordon Moore, Intel had told IBM that the 386 would be ready in time for OS/2 shipping. Moore claims IBM didn't believe him and carried on writing OS/2 for the 286. When the 386 was launched in September 1986 it left OS/2 seriously underpowered.
Making things worse, IBM and Microsoft didn't deliver OS/2's various 'extra bits' (namely Presentation Manager - the Windows-like front end for OS/2). Despite Microsoft and IBM saying "DOS was dead", users wholeheartedly stuck with it.
Thus by 1990 the market — and the technology on the PC platform — was ready for something new. Microsoft was still working with IBM when it launched Windows 3.0 and — according to Gates — it sold twice as many copies as Microsoft had expected. Windows 3.0 sat 'on top' of DOS; requiring users to load DOS on their machine and then load Windows second. This allowed users to swap between DOS and Windows rather than picking just one environment, making the gradual move to Windows possible.
Windows 3.0 heavily resembled
Apple Computer's
System 7 (Microsoft went as far as hiring Apple employees in its Windows design team). In the past, users had typed in commands into the MS-DOS interface (a
Command line interface) whereas now they had a Graphical User Interface
GUI which used a mouse and cursor to point to small pictures of tasks
icons to perform tasks and run programs. Windows 3.0 was followed by Windows 3.1 in 1991, and eventually 3.11, which allowed users to network their PCs.
With the two companies still working together in the early 1990's, the success of Windows 3.0 — and the relative failure of OS/2 — caused some friction. According to Gates, IBM said to Microsoft that it should drop Windows and work solely on OS/2. Microsoft declined and eventually the two split; Microsoft took its code for OS/2 3.0 — codenamed OS/2 NT (for New Technology) with it. OS/2 NT would mutate into
Windows NT and eventually into
Windows 2000 and
XP.
Windows NT was launched in 1993. It was a parallel development to Windows for DOS; aimed at the server market, it was supposed to be a fully professional system that wouldn't rely on DOS. At this time take up was very small, as the system was power hungry and had relatively few applications.
Development of the traditional Windows platform continued, adding more features, standardised protocols, and hardware support. In 1995
Windows 95 was born. Prior to Windows 95, games were designed to be only run under MS-DOS, requiring users to reboot into DOS and tweak memory settings (see the
640k barrier). Windows 95 provided a system called DirectX which allowed programmers access to a standard API to perform video and sound card calls from Windows, revolutionising the games arena. A PC programmer could benefit from Windows 95's memory management capabilities and extended functionality, and have
API access to the graphics and sound cards - of which there were many versions and drivers. 3D graphics were possible from within Windows, (for those with
3Dfx cards) and now network multiplayer 3D graphics games were in the realms of possibility to almost every programmer.
Windows 95 was replaced with
Windows 98 in 1998 and then with Windows 98SE (Second Edition) in 1999. It was Microsoft's intention to combine its Windows NT and Windows 9x (as the various versions of Windows from 95 to ME were called) operating systems and the phasing out of the Windows 9x operating systems. At first, Microsoft was to finish the 9x line with Windows 98SE but when it was apparent that its NT line needed more power than the average 9x PC could deliver, the phasing out was delayed and Microsoft launched an 'interim' version of Windows:
Windows ME in 2000.
In February 2000 the latest version of Windows NT was released (called Windows 2000). In October 2001
Windows XP was launched, expected to replace all previous versions of Windows and, at time of writing (April 2006), has had two service pack updates and is not expected to be replaced by the next version of Windows — called
Windows Vista — until 2007.
Challenges to Wintel domination
The success of Microsoft Windows had driven nearly all other rival commercial
operating systems into near-extinction, and had ensured that the PC was the dominant
computing platform. This meant that if a manufacturer only made their software for the
Wintel platform, they would be able to reach out to the vast majority of computer users. By the mid to late
1990s, introducing a rival operating system had become too risky a commercial venture. Experience had shown that even if an operating system was superior to Windows, it would be a failure.
However, a free operating system was being developed by enthusiasts in their spare time —
Linux. Despite the fact that Microsoft programmers were programming for a living and the programmers working on Linux were programming as recreation, Linux became used by a great number of people in a vast number of settings. The sheer number of contributors to the Linux project allowed development effort comparable to that of the Microsoft programmers. After a couple of years, Linux had become a very powerful operating system and, because it was free, it spread widely.
Linux had become a serious alternative operating system by the late 1990s and was seen as an example of what could be achieved by the
open source movement. While initially lacking in software and being incompatible with Windows, Linux (like Windows NT) was shown to be more stable than Windows 9x-based operating systems. However, Windows still remains the dominant desktop operating system.
On the hardware front, Intel decided to license their technology so that other manufacturers could make
x86 compatible
CPUs. In other cases, companies such as
AMD and
Cyrix produced alternative CPUs compatible with Intel's. Towards the end of the 1990s, AMD was taking a huge chunk of the CPU market for PCs and even ended up playing a significant role in directing the evolution of the 'x86 platform when its Athlon processors were released in
1999, two years before the comparable Intel Pentium 4 architecture was released.
DirectX, while solving many of the problems in programming the PCs, was only compatible with Windows.
OpenGL, which was available for several platforms, was ported to Windows, and offered a means of rapidly developing cross-platform 3D applications.
The PC today
|
A modern PCs case. This is more fancy than the traditional beige box cases used throughout the 90s and late 80s. |
The original IBM PC is long forgotten and the term 'PC compatible' is not used. The processor speed and memory are many
orders of magnitude greater than they were on the original
IBM PC, yet any well-behaved program for the original IBM PC that does not call the hardware directly can still run on a modern PC. Some say that the desire for
backward compatibility might have hindered the development of the PC, but many believe the ability to run
legacy software is what helped keep the PC alive.
The modular design makes it possible to choose every component of a PC from a variety of different manufacturers and to buy only what is needed for the tasks the computer is intended to carry out. Upgrades are easy. It is also possible to choose the operating system to run on the PC, and what software to run.
Software and compatibility amongst different PCs and hardware compatibility is no longer a major issue. There are other platforms in existence today (mostly the Apple Macintosh), but they are a minority.
Thanks to intuitive user interfaces and the information-gathering and communications capabilities of the
Internet, the computer has finally escaped from the domain of computer professionals and computer hobbyists, and has become mainstream.
The design of
computer cases has become more elaborate and users can modify the cases themselves (this is known as
case modding), but even so, the plain
beige box case design that has been around since the 80s is still common.
There is a thriving
demo scene, and a huge community of people willing to write
free software.
A
PC can come in one of the following configurations:
A computer that sits on the top of a desk (or often under the desk, with its
peripherals on top of the desk).
Portability is not part of the design, so the
desktop computers tend to be too heavy and too large to carry. This has the advantage that the components do not need to be miniaturised, and are therefore cheaper.
Not long after the first IBM-PC came out, Compaq produced the
Compaq Portable — one of the first
portable PC compatible computers. Weighing in at 28 pounds, it was more of a "luggable" than a "portable".
The
portable computer evolved into the
laptop. Unlike laptops, portable computers usually do not run on
batteries.
A
Laptop (also known as a
Notebook) is a PC that has been miniaturised so that it is easy to carry and can fit into a small space. It uses a flat-screen
LCD which is folded onto the
keyboard to create a slab-shaped object. Carrying a
laptop around is easy, but this increased portability comes at a cost. To reduce size and mass, a special design is used with smaller components. These components are more expensive than regular components. The design is more integrated meaning that it is less expandable, although the
RAM and the
hard drive can be upgraded. Laptops are also battery powered, so as well as being smaller, the components need to have a low power-usage.
In 1996,
Toshiba produced the
Libretto range of
sub-notebooks (
mini-notebooks). The first model (the
Libretto 20) had a volume of
821.1 cm3 and weighed just 840 grams. They were fully
PC compatible (unlike
PDAs). There were several models produced in the
Libretto range. In 2005, Toshiba announced a new model, the Libretto U100.
Over the years, there have been many
operating systems for the PC:
*
CP/M-86 from
Digital Research.
*
DOS and its derivatives,
**
PC-DOS from
IBM - no longer commercially available.
**
MS-DOS from
Microsoft - no longer commercially available.
**
DR-DOS from Digital Research - Still commercially available from
DeviceLogics.
**
OpenDOS derived from DR-DOS
**
Enhanced Dr-DOS Open source derivative of OpenDOS - development continues.
**
FreeDOS free software rewrite of DOS from scratch under the GPL - development continues.
**
FreeDOS-32 extended version of FreeDOS with restricted backward compatability - development continues.
*
Microsoft Windows in various forms,
**
Windows 3.1**
Windows 95 and derivatives
**
Windows NT and its derivatives
*
OS/2 from
IBM *
BeOS*
ReactOS GPL licensed NT-compatible kernel - development continues.
*
Unix variants,
**
Coherent - no longer available.
**
Xenix now
SCO Unix.
**
GNU/Linux in its many distributions,
***
Debian***
Fedora Core and
Red Hat Enterprise Linux from
Red Hat***
Ubuntu***
Gentoo***
Mandriva***
SUSE**
BSD and its derivatives
***
OpenBSD***
NetBSD***
FreeBSD***
DragonflyBSD**
SolarisThere were also many other OSs that however weren't well known.
*
Computer hardware*
Computer software*
IBM PC*
Personal computer*
Homebuilt computer*
History of computing hardware (1960s-present)*
PC speakerPC Resources
*
The PC Guide! – Contains detailed historical and technical information. Many resources about PCs and some links.
*
WiredGuide Resources Page – A collection of links to PC resources.
