Datapoint
The San Antonio terminal maker whose instruction set, by a roundabout route, became x86.
Computer Terminal Corporation was founded in 1968 and shipped the Datapoint 2200 in 1970: a programmable terminal that was, for all practical purposes, a personal computer. CTC asked Intel to put its processor on a single chip, then turned the result down – but Intel kept the design and sold it as the 8008. From there the line runs to the 8080 and on to x86, making Datapoint's engineers the accidental ancestors of most computers in use today.
Renamed Datapoint in 1972, the company also created ARCnet in 1977, one of the first commercial local area networks, years before Ethernet took off. An accounting scandal in the early 80s started the slide.