alt Hacker News-- Everyone knew flat was best but were stuck with 8086 crap.--
This! Thats one of the most interesting things to me: Actually very often in the IT-world, the worst competitor won the race while better solutions were known and available: Microsoft, Intel etc.
Esp. that MS won for decades while making mainly a very bad OS, though they have some good enterprise products.
How would the world look, if Unix/BSD would have won this race?
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I really wonder if Unix is best we can do. Or is it also worst? So in the end two of the worst options won. It did make sense back in time. But could it have been replaced with something better later?
A PC with DOS was cheaper than a PC with Xenix, let alone a typical Unix machine. Also much easier to learn to use.
Macs also existed but were expensive. The PC with DOS was both powerful and cheap.
Being technically best has long been known to not be correlated to market success in the way that makes logical sense to technical people who feel confused about this.
There was a Microsoft operating system for protected mode 80286 in 1983. It was Xenix 286; it was basically 7th Edition Unix without the branding; and it was touted as the multiuser operating system that MS-DOS would be the gateway to. How would the world look if Microsoft had won the race? (-: