In 1980 IBM, under pressure from its customers to provide computers for personal use, not just mainframes, set out to create the IBM PC; given the project’s low internal priority but high external demand they decided to outsource two critical components: Microsoft would provide the DOS operating system, which would run on the Intel 8088 processor. Those two deals would shape the computing industry for the following 27 years. Given that the point of the personal computer was to run applications, ...