alt Hacker NewsIt’s the same situation as game consoles. Custom built hardware that is only meant to run the one specific vendor OS. There have been many other computing devices like that in the past as well. The general purpose desktop computer that allows a choice of operating systems is actually less common than the other way. Historically, people didn’t expect to run alternate operating systems on a mainframe, 80s and 90s computers like a Commodore 64, Power PC Macs, Amigas and DOS/Windows machines until Linux came along.
That’s odd, because I remember being a user of MUSIC on the university System/360. I imagine it also sounds odd to all those people who ran AT&T Unix on their PDP/11 systems instead of a Digital OS like RTS/11. Or the people who ran Xenix on their PCs. Or the folks like me who installed OS/2 on what was sold as an MS-DOS machine. Then there were the folks who ran A+ on their Atari.