Having lived through the computing renaissance of the '80s (that ended with Microsoft dominance through the '90s and 00's), I do not assume that something bette

Having lived through the computing renaissance of the '80s (that ended with Microsoft dominance through the '90s and 00's), I do not assume that something better would have come along. Early 80s were a mess, with tens of competing hardware/os combinations (e.g. in 1985, you had C64, Spectrum, QL, BBC B+, AppleII, MSX, CPC664, Elan, Oric, Dragon, PC-XT, Lisa, Mac, Amiga, TI-99/4A, Atari {ST,XL,XE} and a few others I probably forgot or ever knew). Each of these was usable computer with its own ecosystem, and they were entirely incompatible with each other. Just like in the early 20th century, there were over a hundred car manufacturers. Consolidation was imminent. But consolidating to a single vendor (Microsoft), I believe, was bad for the market. Three or four hw/os combinations for home computers would have been much better overall. E.g. the Amiga in 1985 had better sound and graphics than the majority of PCs in 1993. It also had a functional multitasking OS that worked better with 512KB of ram in 1985 than Windows did with 4MB of ram in 1992. With microsoft becoming a single standard, there was no pressure to become better. And contrary to what some people here think, microsoft did NOT win the war fairly. e.g. Users did not choose BeOS because microsoft strongarmed PC makers into not including BeOS.