By the early 1980s, the chaos and incompatibility that was rife in the early microcomputer market had given way to a smaller number of de facto industry standards, including the S-100 bus expansion board, the CP/M operating system, the Apple II home computer, the use of the programming language Microsoft BASIC in read-only memory (ROM), and the 5+1⁄4 inch floppy drive storage medium.
[1] Intel has claimed that this partnership has enabled the two companies to give customers the benefit of "a seemingly unending spiral of falling prices and rising performance".
It was unusual for an IBM product because it was largely sourced from outside component suppliers and was intended to run third-party operating systems and software.
IBM published the technical specifications and schematics of the PC, which allowed third-party companies to produce compatible hardware, the so-called open architecture.
Others (such as Digital, then the world's second-largest computer company, Hewlett-Packard, and Apricot) concentrated on making similar but technically superior models.
Other early market leaders (such as Tandy-Radio Shack or Texas Instruments) stayed with outdated architectures and proprietary operating systems for some time before belatedly realizing which way market trends were going and switching to the most successful long-term business strategy, which was to build a machine that duplicated the IBM PC as closely as possible and sell it for a slightly lower price, or with higher performance.
First, it meant that it was rational to write for the IBM PC and its clones as a high priority, and port versions for less common systems at leisure.
There was as yet no sign of the "Win" half of "Wintel," though Microsoft was achieving enormous revenues from DOS sales both to IBM and to an ever-growing list of other manufacturers who had agreed to buy an MS-DOS license for every machine they made, even those that shipped with competing products.
Although the open architecture of the PC and its successors had been a great success for them, and they were the biggest single manufacturer, most of the market was buying faster and cheaper IBM-compatible machines made by other firms.
This was the crucial turning point: the industry as a whole was no longer content to let IBM make all the major decisions about technical direction.
IBM planned to replace DOS with the vastly superior OS/2 (originally an IBM/Microsoft joint venture, and unlike the PS/2 hardware, highly backward compatible), but Microsoft preferred to push the industry in the direction of its own product, Windows.
For the competing computer manufacturers, large or small, the only common factors to provide joint technical leadership were operating software from Microsoft, and CPUs from Intel.
Intel made a successful major push into the motherboard and chipset markets—becoming the largest motherboard manufacturer in the world and, at one stage, almost the only chipset manufacturer—but badly fumbled its attempt to move into the graphics chip market, and (from 1991) faced sharp competition in its core CPU territory from AMD, Cyrix, VIA and Transmeta.
There have been opinions that Microsoft Windows by its natural software bloat has eaten up much of the "hardware progress" that Intel processors gave to the "Wintel platform" via Moore's law.
[5] After the rise of smartphones and netbooks some media outlets have speculated predicting a possible end of Wintel dominance with more and more cheap devices employing other technologies.