I suspect the real answer is not commodity hardware, but commodity software. As in, it wasn't the PC that "won", it was MS-DOS on PC-compatible hardware. You c

I suspect the real answer is not commodity hardware, but commodity software. As in, it wasn't the PC that "won", it was MS-DOS on PC-compatible hardware. You can't clone a Mac without their ROMs, and a clean-room implementation would fall quickly behind without a sustained effort. But Microsoft can sell anyone the disks, and your clone can respond to the right interrupt calls, and IBM can't do a thing to stop either of you.