3 ms·

You seem to be completely forgetting all the other PCs and home computers of their time like the C64 or the Amiga. Without Microsoft opening the market for clon

by ginko 6y ago

You seem to be completely forgetting all the other PCs and home computers of their time like the C64 or the Amiga. Without Microsoft opening the market for clones the IBM PC might have remained an overpriced office machine and some other company would have created the most popular computer system. In any case, none of these(not IBM, not Apple, not Commodore etc.) restricted what software you could run on your computer.

flohofwoe 6y ago
Not forgotten, I was an Amiga owner myself ;) But somehow these machines feel like belonging to another universe today. Commodore management would have ruined the company either way, this didn't require any help from the PC. Atari would probably have focused on the games console business. Anyway, it's fun to speculate about alternative futures :)
parasubvert 6y ago
The PC started its life as a hobby platform. And there were attempts to challenge the open model - the game consoles for example required devs to license their SDKs and often controllers publishing / retail distribution. But no one seriously succeeded with a closed PC experience because no one could (or wanted to) do it all - be a fully integrated retail ecosystem - at the time when facing consumers. The internet was arguably a prerequisite for this: all software was sold in physical boxes and unlike game software , the hobby experience meant there was just too much available that was cheap/free/shareware. (My favorite was the assembly hex codes published in magazines like Ahoy! That you’d type in). Plus, the security of a curated store was on few minds until the late 90s with the internet. Viruses and Trojans existed but they were spread through physical media. also, Microsoft already was getting its tax from users in the form of Windows licensing, which eventually was deemed anticompetitive due to their exclusivity arrangements. The closest to a curated ecosystem started with Qlink, CompuServe, AOL and other online services.

by ginko 6y ago

flohofwoe 6y ago

Not forgotten, I was an Amiga owner myself ;) But somehow these machines feel like belonging to another universe today. Commodore management would have ruined the company either way, this didn't require any help from the PC. Atari would probably have focused on the games console business. Anyway, it's fun to speculate about alternative futures :)

parasubvert 6y ago

The PC started its life as a hobby platform. And there were attempts to challenge the open model - the game consoles for example required devs to license their SDKs and often controllers publishing / retail distribution. But no one seriously succeeded with a closed PC experience because no one could (or wanted to) do it all - be a fully integrated retail ecosystem - at the time when facing consumers. The internet was arguably a prerequisite for this: all software was sold in physical boxes and unlike game software , the hobby experience meant there was just too much available that was cheap/free/shareware. (My favorite was the assembly hex codes published in magazines like Ahoy! That you’d type in). Plus, the security of a curated store was on few minds until the late 90s with the internet. Viruses and Trojans existed but they were spread through physical media. also, Microsoft already was getting its tax from users in the form of Windows licensing, which eventually was deemed anticompetitive due to their exclusivity arrangements. The closest to a curated ecosystem started with Qlink, CompuServe, AOL and other online services.