High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones. They duplicated almost exactly all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers` ability to reverse engineer the BIOS using a "clean room design" technique. Columbia Data Products built the first clone of the IBM personal computer by a clean room implementation of its BIOS.