Post B5eQis6BbAXT3umijA by meluzzy@woof.tech
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 (DIR) Post #B5eQis6BbAXT3umijA by meluzzy@woof.tech
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       If it wasn't for IBM only patenting the BIOS of the IBM PC, companies would have given up on attempting to create PC clones to compete in that market. And the PC architecture wouldn't have become widespread enough to the point that nowadays the concept of being able to buy spare parts to build a computer from scratch wouldn't even exist.There would be 2 or 3 computer manufacturers and we would all be buying prebuilt computers from them, each with incompatible architectures, and if you wanted a specific configuration you would be stuck with whatever their computers offered, if they offered any upgrades at all.Third-party mods would exist but they could be discouraged by the manufacturers and they could be maliciously "unsupported".We are not in a good timeline, but we can build computers out of parts from different manufacturers. And I think that is something that we could have never truly experienced outside of small hobbyist experiments if it wasn't for a series of unexpected lucky events.And that's something cool in my opinion.