Built quickly from off-the-shelf components including an Intel 8088 processor and licensed Microsoft operating system, the IBM PC gave corporate buyers the confidence to adopt personal computers en masse, since it carried IBM's trusted brand. Its open architecture inadvertently spawned an entire industry of compatible 'clone' manufacturers, ultimately defining the dominant PC platform for the next forty years.
IBM had watched Apple, Commodore, and Tandy carve out the personal computer market through the late 1970s while corporate customers remained skeptical of computers without IBM's imprimatur. To respond quickly, IBM's Boca Raton team, led by Don Estridge, broke with company tradition and built the machine from off-the-shelf, non-proprietary parts, including an Intel 8088 processor and an operating system, PC DOS, licensed rather than built in-house from a small company called Microsoft.
That licensing decision, allowing Microsoft to retain the right to sell its DOS software to other manufacturers, would prove to be one of the most consequential business decisions of the twentieth century. Within a few years, companies like Compaq successfully reverse-engineered IBM's BIOS, launching a flood of IBM-compatible 'clone' PCs that undercut IBM's own prices while running the same software.
The result was the emergence of the 'Wintel' standard, the combination of Microsoft's operating systems and Intel's processors, that came to dominate personal computing for decades, eventually helping make Microsoft the most valuable software company in the world while IBM's own PC division withered and was eventually sold off to Lenovo in 2005.