This is one aspect of why the DOS/Windows ecosystem swamped away the old software industry. People who worked before windows don't seem to grasp this simple fac

This is one aspect of why the DOS/Windows ecosystem swamped away the old software industry. People who worked before windows don't seem to grasp this simple fact. Tons of variations : Why wasn't UNIX used ? Why did dBase beat all the minicomputer and mainframe solutions ? Why weren't the free C compilers used by hobbyist programmers ? Why did nobody run X11 ? The answer is this : because doing that cost unreasonable amounts of money. Either they did so directly, or because necessary hardware cost boatloads. And that happened because of 2 effects : either because it only ran on one kind of architecture that was really, really expensive, or because it required ridiculous amounts of resources.