They had made the 8008 and 8080, but those were awkward and ungainly chips meant to power calculators, of all things. iAPX 432 was a clean sheet 32 bit design designed for high level languages and real computers, kind of like mini Lisp machines, complete with native machine support for garbage collection. But it was taking a while to get out the door, and performance wasn't so great, so they hacked together a quick upgrade to the 8080... the 8088, which was used in the original IBM PC.
They had made the 8008 and 8080, but those were awkward and ungainly chips meant to power calculators, of all things. iAPX 432 was a clean sheet 32 bit design designed for high level languages and real computers, kind of like mini Lisp machines, complete with native machine support for garbage collection. But it was taking a while to get out the door, and performance wasn't so great, so they hacked together a quick upgrade to the 8080... the 8088, which was used in the original IBM PC.
History takes over from there.