Forgotten tech giants: How past innovators shaped today's PCs

Let's start with the company Adaptec. Its ASPI standard was decisive in shaping communication interfaces with data carriers. It made managing disks and drives so much easier that Microsoft licensed it and included it in Windows 95. During the years of using boot floppy disks and IDE drives, Adaptec solutions were ubiquitous in PCs. The situation changed permanently only with the popularisation of USB and SATA standards. Microsemi acquired Adaptec.

Compaq is another company whose name was seen wherever PCs were found. It became renowned for producing the first legally developed IBM PC clone and then the Compaq Portable series of portable computers. However, the key product was the Compaq Deskpro from 1986, the first PC based on the 386 processor (IBM was lagging). Today's PCs are more similar to the Deskpro than to the IBM PC (this is certainly true in the case of IBM PS/2).

Despite the reputation of its workstations and the innovativeness of its iPAQ palmtops, Compaq couldn't withstand the competition and was acquired by HP. Today's HP driver packages are still called "SoftPaqs," a nod to Compaq's support department. The brand was closed in 2013, and the trademark was lent to an Indian TV manufacturer for the local market. It's a pity because, without Compaq, today's computers would look entirely different, and the transition to the 32-bit world would have taken longer.

Oak Technology was a company that created the ATAPI standard and the CD-ROM access driver—famously known as OAKCDROM.SYS. It was used for reading CDs in the Windows 3.x era, and Windows boot disks relied on it much longer until 2000. Despite its significant contribution to developing modern workstations, Oak could not sell its innovative graphics chips, resulting in a crisis and liquidation. After a series of acquisitions, Oak's intellectual property is now in the hands of Qualcomm.

Crystal Semiconductor may be a slightly lesser-known name, although it was familiar to every sound card owner for whom Creative was too expensive. Present in cheap OEM computers (e.g., many Optimus) and laptops, Crystal's chips offered a good alternative to Sound Blasters. The company's success was noticed by the giant Cirrus Logic, which acquired Crystal back in 1991. Over a decade later, the brand was discontinued, and Crystal's solutions found their place in Cirrus Logic products, which today produce amplifiers, converters, and hardware codecs.

Abit comes from slightly later times. This motherboard manufacturer had its glory days at the turn of the century. Its success was due to designs like the BP6—a dual-processor board for overclockers. However, the company fell victim to the Asian capacitor plague: existing financial troubles combined with a wave of failures led Abit to be sold and closed, with its patents owned by the Chinese company USI.

3dfx is a brand known to every gaming enthusiast over thirty. It was responsible for transforming graphics cards into full-fledged GPUs on PCs—the first step on this path was the Voodoo chipset, a 3D accelerator. Initially, accelerators were separate cards. Only later did integrated designs appear. 3dfx was eventually overtaken by competitors, mainly NVIDIA, which acquired 3dfx at the beginning of 2001.

Although later known for its audio equipment, Conexant was mainly present in PCs due to modems. Before the world moved to broadband connections, a modem was the most common way to connect to the internet. Conexant did not disappear because modems went extinct but due to a series of acquisitions and divisions, which were numerous in the company's history. The last one, shortly after a major driver issue, was the acquisition by Synaptics in 2017.

In the second part, we will discuss processors—those advertised as fully compatible alternatives to 386 and Pentium—and why many potential Intel competitors were hesitant to challenge Intel's dominance.