He wasn’t talking about x86 when he said ‘PC’, he was talking really about DOS. That’s clear because he said OS/2 and Presentation Manager could be a new curve.

He wasn’t talking about x86 when he said ‘PC’, he was talking really about DOS. That’s clear because he said OS/2 and Presentation Manager could be a new curve. Of course then Windows came out, which he couldn’t have foreseen, and that proved to be the next curve but he was still right. The Windows 3.x/95 architecture had its own successful decade long run. He was also right about the Mac (OS) architecture of the time peaking, and going into a glide slope in the 90s. That’s exactly what happened and it was running into the ground by the late 90s when he came back to Apple. What he didn’t anticipate was that advanced pre-emptive multitasking, multi-user OSes with virtual memory, multi-threading, process isolation and all that good stuff would escape the glide slope model. Still, being pretty much spot on for a whole decade into the future at that time is pretty impressive.