The proliferation of personal computers by the end of the 70-ies led to some reduction in demand for large mainframe and minicomputers. This was a matter of serious concern to the company IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) - a leading company for the production of large computers, and in 1979 from IBM decided to try their strength in the market of personal computers.
However, company management underestimated the future importance of this market and considering the creation of a computer is only as a small experiment - a sort of one of dozens held company works to create new equipment. If you do not want to spend on this experiment too much money, company management has provided the unit responsible for the project, unprecedented in the company freedom. In particular, he was not allowed to konstru -
irovat PC «zero», and use blocks made by other firms. And the unit is full utilization of the opportunity.
First of all, as the main microprocessor computer was chosen when the latest 16-bit microprocessor Intel-8088. Its use has greatly increased the potential of computers as well as a new microprocessor allows you to work with 1 MB of memory, and all available when computers were limited to 64 KB. A computer was used and other components of various firms, and its software has been tasked to develop a small company Microsoft.
In August 1981 a new computer, called IBM PC (read - IBM Pi-Si) was formally presented to the public and soon after he acquired more and more popular among users. After a year or two computer IBM PC took the lead in the market, replaced the model 8-bit computers. In fact, IBM PC became the standard personal computer. Now those computers ( «compatible with the IBM PC») constitute about 90% of all produced the world's personal computers.