IBM Personal Computer in the context of Macintosh

Marcel Lajos Breuer (/ˈbrɔɪər/ BROY-ur; 21 May 1902 – 1 July 1981) was a Hungarian-American modernist architect and furniture designer. He moved to the United States in 1937 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1944.

At the Bauhaus he designed the Wassily Chair and the Cesca Chair, which The New York Times have called some of the most important chairs of the 20th century. Breuer extended the sculpture vocabulary he had developed in the carpentry shop at the Bauhaus into a personal architecture that made him one of the world's most popular architects at the peak of 20th-century design. His work includes art museums, libraries, college buildings, office buildings, and residences. Many are in a Brutalist architecture style, including the former IBM Research and Development facility which was the birthplace of the first personal computer. He is regarded as one of the great innovators of modern furniture design and one of the most-influential exponents of the International Style.

Compaq Computer Corporation was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compatible computers, being the second company after Columbia Data Products to legally reverse engineer the BIOS of the IBM Personal Computer. It rose to become the largest supplier of PC systems during the 1990s. The company was initially based in Harris County, Texas.

The company was formed by Rod Canion, Jim Harris, and Bill Murto, all of whom were former Texas Instruments senior managers. All three had left the company in 1991 due to an internal shakeup, and saw Eckhard Pfeiffer appointed as president and CEO, who served throughout the 1990s. Ben Rosen provided the venture capital financing for the fledgling company and served as chairman of the board for 17 years from 1983 until September 28, 2000, when he retired and was succeeded by Michael Capellas, who served as its last chairman and CEO until its merger.

An IBM PC compatible is any personal computer that is hardware- and software-compatible with the IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC) and its subsequent models. Like the original IBM PC, an IBM PC–compatible computer uses an x86-based central processing unit, sourced either from Intel or a second source like AMD, Cyrix or other vendors such as Texas Instruments, Fujitsu, OKI, Mitsubishi or NEC and is capable of using interchangeable commodity hardware such as expansion cards. Initially such computers were referred to as PC clones, IBM clones or IBM PC clones, but the term "IBM PC compatible" is now a historical description only, as the vast majority of microcomputers produced since the 1990s are IBM compatible. IBM itself no longer sells personal computers, having sold its division to Lenovo in 2005. "Wintel" is a similar description that is more commonly used for modern computers.

The designation "PC", as used in much of personal computer history, has not meant "personal computer" generally, but rather an x86 computer capable of running the same software that a contemporary IBM or Lenovo PC could. The term was initially in contrast to the variety of home computer systems available in the early 1980s, such as the Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore 64. Later, the term was primarily used in contrast to Commodore's Amiga and Apple's Macintosh computers.

Boca Raton (/ˌboʊkə rəˈtoʊn/ BOH-kə rə-TOHN; Spanish: Boca Ratón [ˈboka raˈton]) is a city in Palm Beach County, Florida, United States. The population was 97,422 in the 2020 census and it ranked as the 23rd-largest city in Florida in 2022. Many people with a Boca Raton postal address live outside of municipal boundaries, such as in West Boca Raton. As a business center, the city also experiences significant daytime population increases. Boca Raton is 45 miles (72 km) north of Miami and is a principal city of the Miami metropolitan area.

It was first incorporated on August 2, 1924 as "Bocaratone", and then incorporated as "Boca Raton" on May 26, 1925. While the area had been inhabited by the Glades culture, as well as Spanish and later British colonial empires prior to its annexation by the United States, the city's present form was developed predominantly by American architect Addison Mizner starting in the 1920s. Mizner contributed to many buildings in the area having Mediterranean Revival or Spanish Colonial Revival architecture. Boca Raton also became a key city in the development of the early computer industry. The city is the birthplace of IBM's first personal computer and various other technologies created by the company.

The Macintosh II is a personal computer designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Computer from March 1987 to January 1990. Based on the Motorola 68020 32-bit CPU, it is the first Macintosh supporting color graphics. When introduced, a basic system with monitor and 20 MB hard drive cost US$5,498 (equivalent to $15,220 in 2024). With a 13-inch color monitor and 8-bit display card, the price was about US$7,145 (equivalent to $19,780 in 2024). This placed it in competition with workstations from Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard.

The Macintosh II was the first computer in the Macintosh line without a built-in display; a monitor rested on top of the case like the IBM Personal Computer and Amiga 1000. It was designed by hardware engineers Michael Dhuey (computer) and Brian Berkeley (monitor) and industrial designer Hartmut Esslinger (case).

The Personal System/2 or PS/2 is IBM's second generation of personal computers. Released in 1987, it officially replaced the IBM PC, XT, AT, and PC Convertible in IBM's lineup. Many of the PS/2's innovations, such as the 16550 UART (serial port), 1440 KB 3.5-inch floppy disk format, 72-pin SIMMs, PS/2 mouse and keyboard port, and video graphics array, went on to become standards in the broader IBM PC compatibles market.

The PS/2 line was created by IBM partly in an attempt to recapture control of the PC market by introducing the advanced yet proprietary Micro Channel architecture (MCA) on higher-end models. These models were in the strange position of being incompatible with the hardware standards previously established by IBM and adopted in the IBM PC compatible industry. Most major PC manufacturers balked at IBM's licensing terms for MCA-compatible hardware, particularly the per-machine royalties. The OS/2 operating system was announced at the same time as the PS/2 line and was intended to be the primary operating system for models with Intel 80286 or later processors. However, at the time of the first shipments, only IBM PC DOS 3.3 was available. OS/2 1.0 (text-mode only) and Microsoft's Windows 2.0 became available several months later. IBM also released AIX PS/2, a UNIX operating system for PS/2 models with Intel 386 or later processors.

AST Research, Inc., later doing business as AST Computer, was an American personal computer manufacturer. It was founded in 1980 in Irvine, California, by Albert Wong, Safi Qureshey, and Thomas Yuen, as an initialism of their first names. Wong left the company nine years later, followed by Yuen in 1992, with Qureshey remaining until AST was acquired by Samsung Electronics in 1997.

The company began by making a circuit board for the IBM PC that boosted its memory storage. AST went public in 1984 and would be a manufacturer of boards and add-on expansion cards. By the late 1980s, it had evolved into a major personal computer manufacturer with its line of Intel i386 based PC clones, and it was the first vendor to announce an i486 PC. In 1990, AST released an NEC PC-9801 clone in the Japanese market, becoming the first American PC vendor to market an NEC clone.

Code page 437 (CCSID 437) is the character set of the original IBM PC (personal computer). It is also known as CP437, OEM-US, OEM 437, PC-8, or MS-DOS Latin US. The set includes all printable ASCII characters as well as some accented letters (diacritics), Greek letters, icons, and line-drawing symbols. It is sometimes referred to as the "OEM font" or "high ASCII", or as "extended ASCII" (one of many mutually incompatible ASCII extensions).

This character set remains the primary set in the core of any EGA and VGA-compatible graphics card. As such, text shown when a PC reboots, before fonts can be loaded and rendered, is typically rendered using this character set. Many file formats developed at the time of the IBM PC are based on code page 437 as well.

The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, spanned multiple models in its first generation (including the PCjr, the Portable PC, the XT, the AT, the Convertible, and the /370 systems, among others), from 1981 to 1987. It eventually gave way to many splintering product lines after IBM introduced the Personal System/2 in April 1987.

Brain is the industry standard name for a computer virus that was released in its first form on 19 January 1986, and is considered to be the first computer virus for the IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC) and compatibles.