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The IBM PC: The Most Influential Non-Invention (www.techspot.com)

submitted 11 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

That closing statement is a real highlight of how lucky we are things went the way they did

To imagine a world without the IBM PC, look no further than an Apple Mac. It's sleek but locked down, with hardware you can't upgrade and compatibility limited to apps from recent years (Macs can have trouble running macOS apps from as late as the 2010s).

Without the IBM PC, home computers might have all followed this closed, proprietary path – the PC was a historic win for tech enthusiasts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Given all the hobbyists at the time, it was inevitable.

If Phoenix hadn't won their BIOS case, they likely would've written their own from scratch anyway. Then we would've had a locked-down IBM PC (because they would've locked the BIOS), and an open Phoenix BIOS.