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It can be argued that the motherboard industry was born by IBM in 1981 with the release their entry level 5150 Personal Computer (IBM PC) which was based on a motherboard. The motherboard provided an Intel 4.77MHz 8088 with 16K bytes of on-board memory, expandable to 640K through the use of plug-in memory boards, eight 8-bit ISA expansion connectors, cassette tape port and keyboard port. All other I/O such as the interface for 160K 5-1/4″ floppy drives, serial and parallel ports were provided by plug-in boards. IBM approached Digital Research about using DR/DOS as an operating system but was rebuffed. IBM approached Microsoft and licensed PC-DOS. Microsoft released PC-DOS 1.1 in 1982 by retaining rights to the operating system allowing them to sell it to other manufacturers.
