You could very well be right on the money, Jobs might have been the one if Gates didn't beat him to it. I really did exaggerate, it wasn't exactly nobody. But

You could very well be right on the money, Jobs might have been the one if Gates didn't beat him to it. I really did exaggerate, it wasn't exactly nobody. But things like CP/M were completely un-necessary on a proper microcomputer which has the OS in ROM like it's supposed to be. I liked Jobs because at the time he was carrying on the idea of almost all code free for his hardware as much as possible, just like the other pioneering companies and enthusiasts. CP/M was a specialty item for a small niche of super-enthusiasts, so they could utilize the additional features it provided right away without having to write code for that themselves. It was worth money to them. Once the PC came out with MS-DOS included, that was the affordable choice for PC's by far. People would have rather not had DOS either if the IBM brand had just included a ROM OS of some kind instead. We wanted disks for storage not for an operating system, that was supposed to be taken for granted. By that time, CP/M was known for being exorbitantly more expensive than MS-DOS, and ordinary non-corporate users couldn't even come near affording Microsoft offerings as his letter describes. Everything was going to be just fine once computers got popular enough for there to be enough critical mass among the majority, which were already making more than enough progress sharing without copyright annoyances [0], to overtake companies like Microsoft technically within a few years, except in those niche areas where that kind of thing once belonged. By providing for user choice of a copyrightable OS, not only at different price points, but price points to being with, IBM set the wheels in motion for there to be far less choice for decades to come. When you think about it, the way AI is finally capable of putting out some decent code that is so remarkable, is partly because it is effectively bypassing the progress that has been curtailed up until now because of its workaround of copyright alone. Compensating for people not having access to all progress that has been made up until any point in time, over decades, and coming out smelling like a rose more than you would have thought. If people themselves hadn't had this restriction this whole time, don't you think overall human advancement would have made the amazing AI results seem less surprising and more of an incremental move? [0] If I said most people were not thinking about it, that's not true. Almost nobody was thinking about it. Almost :) I'm also sure they would have started thinking about it sooner or later, the ka-ching sound has quite an echo, but it would have been just fine with only patents and no copyright like it had been before.