Wintel
Wintel is a portmanteau of Windows and Intel, referring to personal computers using Intel x86-compatible processors running Microsoft Windows.
By the early 1980s, the chaos and incompatibility that was rife in the early microcomputer market had given way to a smaller number of de facto industry standards, including the S-100 bus, CP/M, the Apple II, Microsoft BASIC in read-only memory (ROM), and the 5 1⁄4 inch floppy drive. No single firm controlled the industry, and fierce competition ensured that innovation in both hardware and software was the rule rather than the exception. Microsoft Windows and Intel processors gained ascendance and their ongoing alliance gave them market dominance.
Intel claimed that this partnership has enabled the two companies to give customers the benefit of "a seemingly unending spiral of falling prices and rising performance". In addition, they claim a "history of innovation" and "a shared vision of flexible computing for the agile business".
In 1981 IBM entered the microcomputer market. The IBM PC was created by a small subdivision of the firm. It was unusual for an IBM product because it was largely sourced from outside component suppliers and was intended to run third-party operating systems and software. IBM published the technical specifications and schematics of the PC, which allowed third-party companies to produce compatible hardware, the so-called open architecture. The IBM PC became one of the most successful computers of all time.
The key feature of the IBM PC was that despite its technical mediocrity and higher-than-market price, it had IBM's enormous public respect behind it. It was an accident of history that the IBM PC happened to have an Intel CPU (instead of the technically superiorMotorola 68000 that had been tipped for it, or an IBM in-house design), and that it shipped with IBM PC DOS (a licensed version of Microsoft's MS-DOS) rather than the CP/M-86 operating system, but these accidents were to have enormous significance in later years.
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