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. They duplicated almost exactly all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to reverse engineer the BIOS using a "clean room design" technique. Columbia Data Products built the first clone of the IBM personal computer by 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 Industry Standard Architecture bus by manufacturers of compatible computers. The term "IBM PC compatible" is now a historical description only, since IBM has ended its personal computer sales.
Descendants of the IBM PC compatibles comprise the majority of personal computers on the market presently, although interoperability with the bus structure and peripherals of the original PC architecture may be limited or non-existent.
Read more about IBM PC Compatible: Origins, Compatibility Issues, The Decreasing Influence of IBM, Expandability, "IBM PC Compatible" Becomes "Wintel", Design Limitations and More Compatibility Issues, Challenges To Wintel Domination, The IBM PC Compatible Today
Famous quotes containing the word compatible:
“English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)