IBM 'legitimized' the personal computer for business use. Their PC was build around Intel's processor. They accidentally made the design clonable, and the OS was not exclusivly licenced.
Compaq was first to jump into this, but soon this opportunity created a massive ecosystem of competing clones all able to run the same binary distributed software packages which fueled both a software industry and a commoditization of the platform which made it much more accesible and affordable.
This enormous ecosystem success forced Intel to remain backward compatible with old instruction sets to run older binaries, with Microsoft forced the same way on OS api's and services. Even IBM itself tried but failed to counter this s runaway train on both the hardware and the software front.
At the processor level I loved the much more sane instruction set of the 68000 family (much like I preferred the Z80 over the 6502 before), but the dynamics of the whole PC ecosytem just steamrolled over the alternative 68000 platforms, even though Atari, Commodore and Apple produced compelling designs.
Yeah, it was the vertically unbundled platform that made the decision. Relative technical qualities of x86 vs 68k had very little to do with the outcome I think.
Compaq was first to jump into this, but soon this opportunity created a massive ecosystem of competing clones all able to run the same binary distributed software packages which fueled both a software industry and a commoditization of the platform which made it much more accesible and affordable.
This enormous ecosystem success forced Intel to remain backward compatible with old instruction sets to run older binaries, with Microsoft forced the same way on OS api's and services. Even IBM itself tried but failed to counter this s runaway train on both the hardware and the software front.
At the processor level I loved the much more sane instruction set of the 68000 family (much like I preferred the Z80 over the 6502 before), but the dynamics of the whole PC ecosytem just steamrolled over the alternative 68000 platforms, even though Atari, Commodore and Apple produced compelling designs.