Taken from MaximumPC, September 2008 Edition

Three short decades ago, Intel launched the 8086 processor to compete in the fledgling 16-bit general-purpose processor market.  Little did the company know that this modest proc was destined to father the most popular CPU architecture of our time.  Since 1978, Intel and its competition have extended the basic architecture multiple times, shipped literally billions of processors, and changed the world!  Happy Birthday!