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Certainly this does not mean that consumers have purchased their systems from Intel because Intel does not sell complete PCs to end users. You can't currently order a system from Intel, nor can you purchase an Intel-brand system from somebody else. What I am talking about is the motherboard. In my opinion, the single most important part in a PC system is the motherboard, and I'd say that whoever made your motherboard would be considered the manufacturer of your system. Even back when IBM was the major supplier of PCs, it primarily made the motherboard and contracted out the other components of the system (power supply, disk drives, and so on) to others.

77MHz 8088-based system to 3GHz or faster Pentium 4 based systems about 20,000 times faster than the original IBM PC (in actual processing speed, not just clock speed). 0, whereas modern systems easily can have 200GB (200 billion bytes) or more of hard disk storage. A rule of thumb in the computer industry (called Moore's Law, originally set forth by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore) is that available processor performance and disk-storage capacity doubles every one and a half to two years, give or take.

IBM lost control of the PC standard in 1987 when it introduced its PS/2 line of systems. Up until then, other companies that were producing PCs literally copied IBM's systems right down to the chips; connectors; and even the shapes (form factors) of the boards, cases, and power supplies. After 1987, IBM abandoned many of the standards it created in the first 33 34 place. That's why for many years now I have refrained from using the designation "IBM compatible" when referring to PCs. If a PC is no longer an IBM-compatible system, what is it?