By 1981, the computer industry was in total disarray by the sheer number of different computer systems available. One could buy computers costing a few hundred dollars for a Commodore PET, or tens of thousands of dollars for a Cromemco's System III small business computer. All of these computers were incompatible with other brands of computers, and were highly unreliable.
Later that year, IBM released their IBM PC. This computer was technically unremarkable, but it was well-designed, and was widely accepted by the market. The success of this computer brought more standardization to the computer market, as the IBM PC became the most popular personal computer available.
The IBM PC quickly monopolized the computer industry, eliminating all of their rivals, with the exception of Apple. The Apple II was technically similar to the IBM PC, but was more geared towards computer graphics than the IBM PC. This difference between IBM PCs (and their clones) and Apple computers has remained similar to this date, with IBM PCs more geared towards business programs such as Lotus 1-2-3, and Apple computers more geared towards graphical programs such as Adobe Photoshop.
With more and more people buying personal computers, and new software pushing the original PC to its limits, Intel decided to introduce a new microprocessor intended for personal computers. This new microprocessor was released in 1982, and was called the 80286. This new processor gave three to six times the performance of the 8086, could address 16 megabytes of physical memory and 1 gigabyte of virtual memory compared to the 8086's 1 megabyte of addressable memory.
With an increasing number of computer users, many new users did not wish to have to learn the syntax of operating systems such as MS-DOS. Because of the increasing demand for a GUI (Graphical User Interface) environment, in 1985, Microsoft released a program called Microsoft Windows. This program allowed users to control their computer in a graphical environment with the ability to run several programs at once, and it was not technically necessary for a user to learn the syntax of MS-DOS (although it still was useful to know, and still is today.) However, this GUI environment required an increased amount of processing power than MS-DOS.
With the increased demand for processing power created by the release of Windows, Intel released the 80386 processor. The 80386 processor was designed for multitasking, featuring a 32-bit bus, higher clock speeds, and 4 gigabytes of addressable physical memory. This microprocessor was a vast improvement over the 80286, and was quickly accepted into IBM PC-compatible systems.
After the introduction of the 80386, microprocessors started to be developed more and more with a graphical user interface in mind, and integrated features in order to speed up GUI environments to acceptable speeds.