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The [[IBM Personal Computer|IBM PC]] was introduced in 1981 and immediately began displacing [[Apple II series|Apple II]] systems in the corporate world, but commodity computing as we know it today truly began when [[Compaq]] developed the first true IBM PC compatible. More and more PC-compatible microcomputers began coming into big companies through the front door and commodity computing was well established.
During the 1980s, microcomputers began displacing larger computers in a serious way. At first, price was the key justification but by the late 1980s and early 1990s, [[Very-large-scale integration|VLSI]] semiconductor technology had evolved to the point where microprocessor performance began to eclipse the performance of discrete logic designs. These traditional designs were limited by speed-of-light delay issues inherent in any CPU larger than a single chip, and performance alone began driving the success of microprocessor-based systems.
By the mid-1990s, nearly all computers made were based on microprocessors, and the majority of general purpose microprocessors were implementations of the [[x86]] instruction set architecture. Although there was a time when every traditional computer manufacturer had its own proprietary micro-based designs, there are only a few manufacturers of non-commodity computer systems today.
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