There was a lot of consolidation in the space. Lots of mom-and-pop shops, IBM, HP, Compaq, Packard Bell, Dell, and many, many more (my first computer was an AST

There was a lot of consolidation in the space. Lots of mom-and-pop shops, IBM, HP, Compaq, Packard Bell, Dell, and many, many more (my first computer was an AST). They all did the same thing, and there wasn't space for that many players. The most telling bit was that IBM, the company that defined what all the others would clone, sold off that business to Lenovo.