Chapter 1: The Personal Computer^13
Year Event
1991 AMD releases its clone of the 386 microprocessor.
1992 Intel releases the 486DX2 microprocessor.
Windows 3.1 is released.
1993 The Intel Pentium microprocessor is announced.
1994 Netscape Navigation browser is released.
Iomega introduces the Zip drive.
1995 Pentium Pro microprocessor is introduced.
1998 Pentium II microprocessor is released.As you can see, many separate events, all of them loosely related, were instrumental
in the development of the personal computer as it exists today. The general structure of
the PC has changed very little since its beginnings in the late 1970s. However, its speed,
capacities, and power have increased nearly exponentially.
For a more fully detailed listing of the timeline and events in the history of the personal
computer, visit the following Web sites: The Microcomputer Timelinewww.islandnet.com/~kpolsson/comphist/
Computer Historywww.komkon.org/fms/comp/
The Home Computer Hall of Famewww.gondolin.org.uk/hchof/
The Historical Computer Societywww.cyberstreet.com/hcs/INTEL VERSUS APPLE
In what has been compared to a religious war at times, the debate has raged for years be-
tween IBM clone users and Macintosh users. The termIBMclonerefers to personal comput-
ers based on the IBM PC AT architecture, an open architecture that was shared with other
computer manufacturers and became the standard for computers with Intel microproces-
sors. Often the “clone” part of the name is dropped and people refer to “IBM computers”
(regardless of their true manufacturer).
With several hundred different manufacturers of IBM-type computers, sales of the
clone have far exceeded the sales of the Apple computers. So much so that the term PC
has come to mean non-Apple computers; although technically Apple computers are
personal computers as well, it is common to hear a distinction made between an Apple
computer and a PC.
In 1971, two pioneering engineers, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, formed Intel to
develop and manufacture microprocessors. One of their first microprocessors, the 8080
(see Figure 1-10), was used in many of the early computers, including the Altair 8800 and
IMSAI 8080, another popular early PC. Over the years, Intel microprocessors have
emerged as the market leader. While other manufacturers such as AMD, Cyrix, and Zilog