> staying compatible with the almost 45 year old CISC instruction set It's easy to take for granted how unusual it was the WinTel hegemony happened at all. As

> staying compatible with the almost 45 year old CISC instruction set It's easy to take for granted how unusual it was the WinTel hegemony happened at all. As a fan of the breathtaking diversity of classic 80s desktop computing (Amiga, Atari, C64, Spectrum, MSX, etc), I lamented the steamroller of WinTel beige-box homogenization as it paved over so many divergent evolutionary branches. Yet the fact I can still install and run mass market consumer software products released in the mid-90s on Windows 11. Yes, a high price was paid in both silicon and OS software to sustain such extraordinary backward compatibility - and is still being paid. While the utility of running circa-Win 95 software today in minimal, it's pretty amazing and I think the underlying stability in APIs, user interfaces and peripheral interfaces had under-appreciated positive impacts on the rapid prolife ation of desktop computing across society. Remember that the landline phone and cable companies initially envisioned the "home computer" to a be little more than a dumb terminal consumers would rent like a telephone handset. We're fortunate that vision failed when the commoditization of PCs allowed the home "internet terminal" to be a full user-owned and controlled computer with significant local processing and storage.