"This was possible in part because the number of available technologies (software + hardware devices) was so limited that, for instance, a C programmer could li

"This was possible in part because the number of available technologies (software + hardware devices) was so limited that, for instance, a C programmer could literally code for any available platform; and we all know how cryptic can easily become a piece of driver code written in C." At the beginning of the 1990s, one still had minicomputers, notably but not only the VAX. In the workstation market, one had MIPS, SPARC, PA-RISC, Alpha, 88000 platforms. And that's not even addressing IBM world.