Introduction - Computer Busses - page 26

this could further erode their market. These two decisions would open the door to the new
kid on the block - Compaq.
Three former Texas Instruments managers founded Compaq Computer Corporation in
1982: Rod Canion, Jim Harris, and Bill Murto. Their first product was Compaq Portable PC.
It was released in the following year (1983), and cost $3000. The Compaq Portable was to-
tally compatible with the IBM PC and used the Intel 8088 (4.77 MHz), had 128 KB RAM, a
9-inch monochrome monitor and had a 320 KB 5.25-inch disk drive (Sony Electronics in the
same year demonstrated the 3.5-inch microfloppy disk system). A large part of the start-up
finance was used to create a version of the ROM BIOS which was IBM compatible, but did
not violate IBM's copyright - a stroke of genius that many failed to follow. Compaq would
soon become the fastest growing company ever. Only in the computer industry could a com-
pany grow from zero to hundreds of millions of dollars within 12 months. Compaq created a
new market, which was based on IBM PC compatibility. They then waited for the great IBM
to come along and sink their product, but when IBM did produce a portable, it was too late,
too heavy, and failed to match the Compaq in its specification. Compaq were not in fact the
first company to clone the IBM PC as they finally released it in 1983 - that was achieved by
Columbia Data Products, with their MPC.
Two companies who would battle against the PC for market share were Sun and Apple.
Sun Microsystems would quickly become a major computer company, and derived its name
from an acronym from the Stanford University Network. Their first product was the Sun 1
workstation computer. They, like Apple, fought the IBM in terms of architecture and operat-
ing system. Sun, almost single-handedly, made the Unix operating system popular. Their
computers succeed in the market, not because they were compatible with any other com-
puter, but because they were technically superior to anything that the IBM PC could offer.
The software that ran on the system fully used the processing power of the processor, and the
Unix operating system provided an excellent robust and reliable operating system. Compati-
bility can often lead to a great deal of problems, especially if the compatibility involves the
8088 processor.
At Apple, champagne corks were popping, as they became the first PC company to gen-
erate $1 billion in annual sales. The Apple II Plus and Apple II had sold over 750 000 units.
After toying with the Lisa computer and new versions of the Apple II, Apple would have one
more trump card up their sleeve: the Apple Macintosh. Microsoft was keen to work with
Apple, in case the relationship with IBM did not work out, and signed an agreement to de-
velop applications for the forthcoming Macintosh (of which Microsoft were given an initial
prototype to work on). IBM had become slightly annoyed with the success of Microsoft,
from the success of their own creation. For Microsoft, it was a no-lose situation. They were,
in the main, sharing code across the two architectures, which would quickly become industry
standards. One would become an open standard (the IBM PC), and the other would be a
closed standard (the Apple Mac).
The year 1982 saw a fantastic growth at Intel, and the only way that they could keep up
with demand was to license their products to other silicon design companies. For this, they
signed a 10-year technology exchange agreement with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) that
focused on the x86 microprocessor architecture. This agreement would be later regretted as
AMD started to overtake them in the 80486 market. Intel, in the same year, released an up-
date to the 8086 processor, called the 80286. The processor was destined for the IBM AT
computer and it ran initially at 6 MHz, which improved on the 4.77 MHz of the 8088 proces-
sor. It had a 16-bit data bus, like the 8086, but had an extended 24-bit address bus that gave it
an addressing range of 16 MB, rather than the 1 MB addressing range of the 8086/8088, or
1 GB of virtual memory. It outperformed the 8086 with a throughput of 0.9 MIPS, but this