PC platform

IBM PC compatible computers are those similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, able to run the same software and support the same expansion cards as those. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones. They duplicate almost exactly all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by IBM's choice of commodity hardware components and various manufacturers' ability to reverse engineer the BIOS firmware 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.

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 with the dominant operating system being Microsoft Windows, although interoperability with the bus structure and peripherals of the original PC architecture may be limited or non-existent. Only the Macintosh (classic Mac OS and macOS) kept significant market share without compatibility with the IBM PC, so consumers are typically identified as being a "PC or Mac" user (similar to the divide in mobile devices between Android and iOS), although current Macintosh models which run on Intel processors are based in part on the PC compatible architecture, albeit with components specific to the Macintosh.

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