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BUT, a big thing in favor of MS is that DOS/Windows didn't sit on proprietary HW. Apple/Atari/Commodore were all proprietary systems. I'm not sure if we would
by kenjackson 15y ago
BUT, a big thing in favor of MS is that DOS/Windows didn't sit on proprietary HW. Apple/Atari/Commodore were all proprietary systems. I'm not sure if we would have seen the rapid rise of video cards in any of those systems.
Hindsight is 20/20, but all things considered I think the tech world is in a pretty good place today.
- pornel 15y agoIBM PC was proprietary as well. "IBM PC-compatible" clones with reverse-engineered BIOS were made despite IBM, not thanks to them.
- kenjackson 15y agoBut the OS was licensed to IBM. MS could sell it to any HW vendor. The HW, with respect to the OS, wasn't proprietary. The MacOS wasn't simply licensed to run on Macs, it was built by Apple to only run on Macs. Despite some toe dips, there never any attempt to really license it. The mistake IBM made wasn't the HW. It was that they let MS license them the OS on a non-exclusive basis. A genius move when you consider it -- most people would have had little belief there'd be a huge MS-DOS market once IBM entered the fold.