Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

The i386 PC won, thanks to the fortunate events, and size, and execution, of IBM, Intel and Compaq from the 8086 PC on. But had that not happened, some other combination of manufacturers would have had mass market 32-bit, affordable (if not super cheap), MMU equipped computers.

Why imagine it, when Acorn, Amiga, Atari, etc., existed and had such machines on the market (the Amiga 3000 with the MMU equipped 68030, the Archimedes). That they didn't succeed against the PC is not an argument that the market would not have existed without the PC. Bizarre.

The entire business model of game consoles has (at least historically) been to sell moderately powerful computers at slightly below cost, and make up the losses in game sales. If you can't sell (enough) games because you can't (sufficiently) control the OS, then you have to raise the price of the console above the price of a comparable gaming PC (or some competing console), and then consumers notice the price is too high and jump ship. That does not apply to generic commodity computers, which are normally sold above cost, the manufacturer does not care what happens after the consumer buys one, and there is (for the most part) nowhere else for consumers to go if the price is too high (aside from other manufacturers of the same product).

It sounds like your claim is that a similar business model (sell lots of software to subsidize your underpriced hardware) would have developed for commodity computers, but I find that difficult to believe. The whole point of games is that they are, to some extent, consumable. You play a game, and then, eventually, you stop playing it and go play something else instead. You may, eventually, return to an old game, but you're still going to want to play something new every now and then, so you keep buying new games. This is not how generic productivity software works - users buy the software they want, and then it may be many years between paid updates, particularly in the time period we're talking about (i.e. long before the subscription model became standardized). You simply don't have enough of a steady income stream to pay for all the hardware.

One thing is certain though, when *many* companies _have already_ been working on building ever more capable, ever cheaper, ever more commodity computers; as most of society (even outside the actual people in the industry) are agreed computers are going to revolutionise things; it was _inevitable_ we were going to get *exactly the thing those many companies were already competing to provide*: A capable, affordable computer suitable for hobbyists to tinker on and write OSes that were never going to amount to anything.

tl;dr: Had Intel, IBM, Compaq - and the following army of cloners - not won dominance, Linus would have been hacking on an Amiga 3000, or an Atari ST, or an Alpha, or... etc. And we would still today have computers everywhere (from your pocket to your car to servers, to the moon) running Linux. Regardless of architecture.

And gosh, Linus *was* hacking on an Alpha by the mid-90s. ;) Maddog didn't mention he arranged that. (And the little Alpha 150 workstation DEC made was fairly cheap - almost affordable; I think Slashdot began running on one of those!).