My own thought experiment - what if “old IBM” had intervened in the product and tried to make it more “IBM”. Well, if they’d done that too much - e.g. a corpora

My own thought experiment - what if “old IBM” had intervened in the product and tried to make it more “IBM”. Well, if they’d done that too much - e.g. a corporate edict that it had to use EBCDIC instead of ASCII - that probably would have killed it commercially. But what if “old IBM” had just demanded ASCII-EBCDIC conversion in the BIOS? With a “code page” field in each directory entry, which could be used to mark files as ASCII or EBCDIC (0=binary), with the BIOS ASCII-EBCDIC conversion service invoked to make EBCDIC files appear as ASCII to applications? That might have made the product more “interesting”, without adding so much complexity as would kill it. z/OS Unix has code page tagging in the filesystem; apparently IBM tried to get it added to DOS during DOS 4 development, but it got pulled before release (although that was not for EBCDIC, just for tagging which ASCII code page a file was) Maybe even demand some optional record-oriented support in the filesystem (e.g RECFM=F80). That would have been less alien to Microsoft than you’d think, because Microsoft BASIC always supported record-based file access.