"Is it PC compatible?" While predicting success for the TI Professional in 1983,
Rosen Electronics Letter added "we'd rather it had been completely compatible with the PC", stating that "we kow of one case (and there will be many)" where a customer chose the PC because of "the name, the trustworthiness and most important of all the identity of IBM". One year after the Rosen prediction,
BYTE described how "the personal computer market seems to be shadowed under a cloud of compatibility: the drive to be compatible with the IBM Personal Computer family has assumed near-fetish proportions", which it stated was "inevitable in the light of the phenomenal market acceptance of the IBM PC". The magazine cited the announcement by
North Star in fall 1983 of its first PC-compatible microcomputer. Founded in 1976, North Star had long been successful with 8-bit
S-100 bus products, and had introduced proprietary 16-bit products, but now the company acknowledged that the IBM PC had become a "standard", one which North Star needed to follow.
BYTE described the announcement as representative of the great impact IBM had made on the industry: The magazine worried in 1984 that "IBM's burgeoning influence in the PC community is stifling innovation because so many other companies are mimicking Big Blue". Those that had "tried to improve on the PC standard",
InfoWorld wrote, "unanimously got burned [and] stifled innovation". The TI and Wang computers were among the failures, as were the DEC and Data General products, despite TI's good reviews and others' success in competing against IBM minicomputers. Even IBM's mainframe rivals, the
BUNCH, introduced their own compatibles despite earlier viewing such a small computer as a "toy"; they and other vendors of large computers had lost sales to existing customers that would have preferred to buy from them if possible.
Sperry stated that its clone was "late to the dance" so as to be more compatible. When Hewlett-Packard (HP) introduced the
Vectra in 1985,
InfoWorld stated that the company was "responding to demands from its customers for full IBM PC compatibility". By contrast, as late as 1991,
Computerworld wrote of DEC's inability to sell PCs to its customers, which bought them from HP, Compaq, and others. Some of the largest vendors, like
Honeywell Information Systems and
Tandem Computers, explicitly admitted that their products were not innovative, but were what customers wanted.
John V. Lombardi wrote in
InfoWorld that the
Epson Equity "is the least innovative [of Epson computers] and, ironically, is probably the most likely to succeed. It is in every way a plain vanilla IBM PC clone". Stating that compatibles were a commodity like televisions with falling prices, Zenith Data Systems's CEO said "Basically, we move boxes". Admitting that "it's what our dealers asked for",
Kaypro introduced the company's first IBM compatible in 1984. Tandy—which had once had as much as 60% of the personal-computer market, but had attempted to keep technical information secret to monopolize software and peripheral sales—also began selling non-proprietary computers; four years after its
Jon Shirley predicted to
InfoWorld that the new IBM PC's "major market would be IBM addicts", the magazine in 1985 called the IBM compatibility of the
Tandy 1000 "no small concession to Big Blue's dominating stranglehold" by a company that had been "struggling openly in the blood-soaked arena of personal computers". The 1000 is compatible with the PC but not compatible with the company's own
Tandy 2000 MS-DOS computer.
Mitch Kapor of
Lotus Development Corporation said in 1984 that "either you have to be PC-compatible or very special". "Compatibility has proven to be the only safe path", Microsoft executive Jim Harris stated in 1985, while
InfoWorld wrote that IBM's competitors were "whipped into conformity" with its designs, because of "the total failure of every company that tried to improve on the IBM PC". Customers only wanted to run PC applications like 1-2-3, and developers only cared about the massive PC
installed base, so any non-compatible—no matter its technical superiority—from a company other than Apple failed for lack of customers and software. Compatibility became so important that
Dave Winer joked that year (referring to the
PC AT's incomplete compatibility with the IBM PC), "The only company that can introduce a machine that isn't PC compatible and survive is IBM". By 1985, the shortage of IBM PCs had ended, causing financial difficulties for many vendors of compatibles; nonetheless, Harris said, "The only ones that have done worse than the compatibles are the noncompatibles". Almost every major computer company offered its own AT compatibles, including vendors that were late to offer PC compatibles; they "see this as a second chance to hitch a ride on the
Boca Raton steamroller",
InfoWorld said. The PC standard was similarly dominant in Europe, with
Honeywell Bull,
Olivetti, and
Ericsson selling compatibles and software companies focusing on PC products. By the end of the year
PC Magazine stated that "IBM has to continue to be IBM compatible or forfeit its market position" when discussing a rumored IBM proprietary, non-compatible operating system. Noting that the company's unsuccessful
PCjr's "cardinal sin was that it wasn't PC compatible", the magazine wrote that "backward compatibility [with the IBM PC] is the single largest concern of hardware and software developers. The user community is too large and demanding to accept radical changes or abandon solutions that have worked in the past". Within a few years of the introduction of fully compatible PC clones, almost all rival business personal computer systems, and alternate x86 using architectures, were gone from the market. Despite the
inherent dangers of an industry based on a
de facto "standard", a thriving PC clone industry emerged. The only other non-IBM PC-compatible systems that remained were those systems that were classified as
home computers, such as the
Apple II, or business systems that offered features not available on the IBM PC, such as a high level of integration (e.g., bundled accounting and inventory) or fault-tolerance and multitasking and multi-user features.
Wave of inexpensive clones Compaq's prices were comparable to IBM's, and the company emphasized its PC compatibles' features and quality to corporate customers. From mid-1985, what
Compute! described as a "wave" of inexpensive clones from American and Asian companies caused prices to decline; by the end of 1986, the equivalent to a real IBM PC with 256K RAM and two disk drives cost as little as , lower than the price of the
Apple IIc. Consumers began purchasing DOS computers for the home in large numbers; Tandy estimated that half of its 1000 sales went to homes, the new
Leading Edge Model D comprised 1% of the US home-computer market that year, and toy and discount stores sold a clone manufactured by
Hyundai—the
Blue Chip PC—like a stereo, without a demonstrator model or salesman. Tandy and other inexpensive clones succeeded with consumers—who saw them as superior to lower-end game machines—where IBM failed two years earlier with the PCjr. They were as inexpensive as home computers of a few years earlier, and comparable in price to the
Amiga,
Atari ST, and
Apple IIGS. Unlike the PCjr, clones were as fast as or faster than the IBM PC and highly compatible so users could bring work home; the large DOS software library reassured those worried about
orphaned technology. Consumers used them for both spreadsheets and entertainment, with the former ability justifying buying a computer that could also perform the latter. PCs and compatibles also gained a significant share of the educational market, while longtime leader Apple lost share. At the January 1987
Consumer Electronics Show, both Commodore and Atari announced their own clones. By 1987 the PC industry was growing so quickly that the formerly business-only platform had become the largest and most important market for computer game companies, outselling games for the Apple II or Commodore 64. By 1988
Computer Gaming World agreed with
Joel Billings of
Strategic Simulations, that an inexpensive PC clone with
EGA graphics was superior for games. MS-DOS software was 77% of all personal computer software sold by dollar value in the third quarter of 1988, up 47% year over year. By 1989 80% of readers of
Compute! owned DOS computers, and the magazine announced "greater emphasis on MS-DOS home computing". Compaq president
Rod Canion asked "What does IBM know about compatibility anyway?", bragging that his computers were more PC compatible than IBM's
PC XT or
Portable PC.
IBM's influence on the industry decreased, as competition increased and rivals introduced computers that improved on IBM's designs while maintaining compatibility. In 1986 the
Compaq Deskpro 386 was the first computer based on the
Intel 80386. In 1987 IBM unsuccessfully attempted to regain leadership of the market with the
Personal System/2 line and proprietary
MicroChannel Architecture.
Clones conquer the home By 1990,
Computer Gaming World told a reader complaining about the many reviews of IBM PC compatible games that "most companies are attempting to get their MS-DOS products out the door, first". It reported that in the US, MS-DOS comprised 65% of the computer-game market, the Amiga at 10%, and all other computers, including the Macintosh, were below 10% and declining. The Amiga and most others, such as the ST and various
MSX2 computers, remained on the market until PC compatibles gained sufficient
multimedia capabilities to compete with home computers. With the advent of inexpensive versions of the
VGA video card and the
Sound Blaster sound card (and its clones), most of the remaining home computers were driven from the market. The market in 1990 was more diverse outside the United States, but MS-DOS and Windows machines nonetheless came to dominate by the end of the decade. By 1995, other than the Macintosh, almost no new consumer-oriented systems were sold that were not IBM PC clones. Throughout the 1990s Apple transitioned the Macintosh from proprietary expansion interfaces to standards such as
IDE,
PCI, and
USB. In 2006, Apple switched the Macintosh to the Intel x86 architecture, allowing them to optionally boot into
Microsoft Windows, while still retaining unique design elements to support Apple's
Mac OS X operating system. In 2008,
Sid Meier listed the IBM PC as one of the three most important innovations in the
history of video games. == Systems launched shortly after the IBM PC ==