American Megatrends International, LLC, doing business as AMI, is an international hardware and software company, specializing in PC hardware and firmware. The company was founded in 1985 by Pat Sarma and Subramonian Shankar. It is headquartered in Building 800 at 3095 Satellite Boulevard in unincorporated Gwinnett County, Georgia, United States, near the city of Duluth, and in the Atlanta metropolitan area.
AMI integrated circuit at a MegaRAID SCSI controller
A chip containing AMI ROM BIOS firmware on a Gigabyte GA-486TA Baby AT motherboard from 1992
A chip containing an old version AMIBIOS image, pulled from an ECS motherboard
IBM PC compatible computers are similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, all from computer giant IBM, that are able to use the same software and expansion cards. Such computers were referred to as PC clones, IBM clones or IBM PC clones. The term "IBM PC compatible" is now a historical description only, since IBM no longer sells personal computers after it sold its personal computer division in 2005 to Chinese technology company Lenovo. The designation "PC", as used in much of personal computer history, has not meant "personal computer" generally, but rather an x86 computer capable of running the same software that a contemporary IBM PC could. The term was initially in contrast to the variety of home computer systems available in the early 1980s, such as the Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore 64. Later, the term was primarily used in contrast to Apple's Macintosh computers.
The Compaq Portable was one of the first nearly 100% IBM-compatible PCs.
The original IBM PC (Model 5150) motivated the production of clones during the early 1980s.
The DEC Rainbow 100 runs MS-DOS but is not compatible with the IBM PC.
MS-DOS version 1.12 for Compaq Personal Computers