The personal computers of 1981, including the Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) II and the IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) PC, were punks by today's standards.

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And in May, Lenovo, a firm with strong connections to China's government, had finalised its purchase of the PC-making arm of IBM.

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Examples of assembly language software you may be familiar with are IBM PC DOS and the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3.

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American William Amelio was hired with much fanfare in late 2005 to take charge of Chinese computer giant Lenovo--and integrate that company's acquisition of ibm's mammoth but moneylosing PC business.

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Within its bowels, Lenovo has some of the DNA of the old IBM, the US firm from which Lenovo bought the enterprise PC division in the mid-2000s.

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Networking revenue grew 40% year over year, as Dell transitioned itself from being a PC-centric company to a software and services company, similar to IBM ( IBM).

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For example, when IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) first asked Gates to write an operating system for its first PC, Gates possessed neither the experience nor the resources to put one together.

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In the past, Lenovo has purchased systems companies IBM PC Division in 2005, German computer maker Medion in 2011 but never a pure-play software firm.

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Those companies were able to clone the IBM PC because IBM made the mistake of allowing its partner, Microsoft, to license a virtually identical version of its PC-DOS operating system to any takers.

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