Here at work we have a few rows of the old school circa: 1983 IBM 3480 auto scratch cart drives. The other day one had failed and the service tech pulled out one of the controller boards. To my suprise the boards were littered with AMD logo's before they were even "well known" as as a microprocessor company. Most the manufacture lables on the chips themselves indicated that they were manufactured by AMD by having an "AM" followed by a serial number. I was able to take the busted parts home, just as a memorial that AMD has truley been around forever. I've shown a few friends and we all certainly get a kick out of it.
AMD has been around yes, but not as an alternative to Intel x86 processors.
In fact, Intel outsourced production of 8086 and 80286 processors to AMD (because of the contract with IBM).
I thought we all knew that.
Intel has been around longer than just the x86 series of processors aswell. But that's not very relevant to this discussion.
AMD didn't enter the x86 market with its own products until 1991. By then the IBM PC platform was already 10 years old.
Ironically enough I actually have a Compaq PC with Intel 486 processor and AMD SCSI/ethernet controller (Lance).