>> For instance desqview would have run on some imaginary DOS like system that would have been created in the power vacuum of the mid 80s. >It'd be DR's MP/M,

>> For instance desqview would have run on some imaginary DOS like system that would have been created in the power vacuum of the mid 80s. >It'd be DR's MP/M, or Microsoft's Xenix. Agreed. Similarly, Microsoft gave up on Xenix once AT&T was allowed to enter the computer market, but had it not gone all-in on OS/2 then Windows in the latter half of the 1980s, Microsoft would surely have at least pushed its concurrent DOS outside its Europe OEM niche. >One prediction I haven't seen is MSX. MSX had the potential to commoditize the home computer segment (and leech money out of every manufacturer the same way they did with the PC) I considered mentioning MSX in my long reply but did not because the absence of an IBM PC would not have affected its success. In the UK, MSX was an also-ran compared to Sinclair, Commodore, Amstrad, and BBC/Acorn. In the US it appeared despite everyone in the early 1980s expecting/dreading the inevitable Japanese invasion of the home computer market. MSX only became significant in markets like Japan and Brazil where, for one reason or another, competing Western home-computer standards were not significant. And it never moved outside the low end; MSX never precluded (for example) PC-88, PC-98, or X68000 in Japan.