> By March 1989, however, Hugh Barnes—now Compaq’s vice president of engineering—started to notice that Intel’s best chip people were being reassigned to other teams. Some quiet investigation revealed the cause. Sun Microsystems, one of Intel’s rivals, had announced chips based on a new design approach called reduced-instruction-set computing (RISC). For Intel, this presented a threat to its higher-end, large computer and mainframe markets. It was now shifting to focus on that threat instead.

> At a hotel room in Silicon Valley, in April 1989, Canion and Gates met with Andy Grove and Intel chair Gordon Moore to try to persuade them to stick with 486 development. After considerable back and forth, Intel reversed course. The new chip launched in late 1989.

Could this be the moment that forever saddled us (and Intel) with the cumbersome legacy of x86? It seems like a great cultural win for PCs in the moment, but in hindsight this decision almost feels backwards somehow.