Mick wrote: Fri Aug 09, 2024 7:09 am
Every 8086 family based PC you see that doesn’t have an IBM badge is a clone.
This is incorrect. The term "PC Clone" or "Clone" as relating to a personal computer was finally defined by PC Magazine in 1983.
a computer that can accommodate the user who takes a disk home from an IBM PC, walks across the room, and plugs it into the 'foreign' machine
while this was true of an actual 8086 known as an "XT" and most 80286's and some 80386's, by the time the 486 came out, the geek crowd always corrected the outdated "clone" term. Before the internet as we know it became available to the public I witnessed this same debate on several BBS's.
Remember BBS's? You dial an actual phone number with your 1440bbs modem and essentially chat, share files and read static text?
btw, the first mentions of IBM Clones I remember actually had nothing to do with the proc architecture. It was about about illegally reverse engineering the BIOS firmware which IBM claimed as proprietary property.