There were numerous 8086 PC compatibles before the PS/2 or the 80286 became popular. The most famous was of course the original Compaq Deskpro, but At&t, Wang,

There were numerous 8086 PC compatibles before the PS/2 or the 80286 became popular. The most famous was of course the original Compaq Deskpro, but At&t, Wang, Eagle and others did too. Yeah, the BIOS had to be aware of the difference between the 8088 and 8086 for some setup stuff, but the 8086 is at the hardware level perfectly happy to talk to an 8-bit bus and the software mostly never knew the difference. edit: And how could I forget (as mentioned by another poster in the thread) the numerous NEC PC98 machines with an 8086 which created their own industry. Sorry for slight, Japan.