On this day in economic and business history…
Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC)’s 8086 microprocessor laid the foundations for Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC)’s flagship x86 architecture and was also the company’s first 16-bit CPU. Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)’s BASIC was its first product, originally devised for the first true microcomputer and later successfully ported to other systems. Like chocolate and peanut butter, these two great computing concerns were made for each other — but that alone doesn’t explain how both companies wound up in the original PC. Marcel Brown writes on the blog This Day in Tech History:
By developing for the 8086 processor, [Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT)] soon formed a relationship with Seattle Computer Products, one of the first companies building computers with an 8086 processor.
As fate would have it, in 1980 Seattle Computer Products was forced to develop an operating system for their computers because a version of the very popular CP/M operating system was delayed for the 8086. It was this 8086 operating system, which SCP called QDOS (for Quick and Dirty Operating System), that Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) soon bought the rights for and licensed to International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) for their new PC. And Microsoft thus began their transformation from a simple software development company in the early history of personal computing to one of the most dominant technology companies in history.
Two decades later, both Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) had become the dominant players in PC hardware and software, respectively, and they were rewarded for their corporate successes with spots on the Dow Jones Industrial Average 2 Minute (INDEXDJX:.DJI) near the peak of the dot-com bubble.
The birth of modern delivery
Making sense of online advertising
The technology had been largely developed by a company called Applied Semantics, which Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) had purchased two months earlier to bolster its contextual-advertising capabilities. The potential for this new advertising technology was immediately apparent: By becoming a self-service advertiser of choice for the entire Internet, Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) could generate revenue whether or not people happened to be using its search engine at any given moment. Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s control over so much of the Internet’s advertising infrastructure has not been without controversy, but this expansion has been greatly beneficial for the company, which now generates roughly a quarter of its advertising revenue from placement on independent websites.
The article The Strange Coincidence That Built Wintel originally appeared on Fool.com is written by Alex Planes.
Fool contributor Alex Planes owns shares of Intel. Add him on Google+ or follow him on Twitter @TMFBiggles for more insight into markets, history, and technology.The Motley Fool recommends FedEx, Google, and Intel. The Motley Fool owns shares of Google, Intel, International Business Machines, and Microsoft.
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