The hardware companies still made heavy use of intellectual property. IBM mainframes were heavily patented. The manuals they shipped with were copyrighted. T

The hardware companies still made heavy use of intellectual property. IBM mainframes were heavily patented. The manuals they shipped with were copyrighted. The software was just mostly seen as an implementation detail and its value independent of hardware hadn’t occurred to most people yet. Also, like it not, companies like Microsoft drove the tech industry forward during the eighties and nineties because of them creating an industry where software has its own monetary value independent of the hardware it ships with. Even open source as we know it would not exist without intellectual property laws. The GPL and similar licenses are only enforceable because of copyright.