[igreulich]

Marginally off topic, but calling a A Windows box a Wintel box implies that there is functional, if not fundamental, difference between Windows/Intel machines and Windows/AMD machines. There isn't.

I ran all the same Active X controls on my WAMD box you did on your Wintel.

Or am I missing something about the Windows/Intel combination?

Anecdote: I switched to Mac (Mintel? Mactel?) in 2007. Prior to that, my 486DX4 100 (circa 1995) was the last Intel I used.

</offtopic>

[lambda]

Wintel just refers to the instruction set, not the actual processor. The reason for using it in this case is that since ActiveX are compiled for x86, they won't run on other platforms that Windows runs on. In the past, Windows NT ran on PowerPC, Alpha, MIPS, and Itanium platforms; now Windows runs on ARM in the form of Windows Phone and Surface. So it's not just IE on Windows that is relevant for ActiveX, it's IE on Windows on x86. But that's a mouthful to say, so people abbreviate it to "Wintel".

[rsanders]

For a while there were non-x86 Windows NT boxes. In fact, there are again with Windows RT. Wintel versus WinDEC or Wintanium or WinMIPS, for example, though there was never enough market shire for any of those to justify a neologism.

[apetrovic]

From Wikipedia:

Wintel is a portmanteau of Windows and Intel, referring to personal computers using Intel x86 compatible processors running Microsoft Windows.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wintel

[drdaeman]

I believe the term was coined this way because x86 was originally invented by Intel.

Although, indeed, Intel lost the control when AMD introduced AMD64. :) But this is really getting offtopic.