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

Posted Aug 2, 2023 21:41 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view by anselm
Parent article: Hall: IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view

We had that on smartphones, too. I even remember few early Android games which would have different versions for HTC Dream, Nexus S and so on.

At some point the zoo have grown so large that people stopped doing that and today most smartphones never get support for anything but what hardware manufacturer provides for them.

Lack of that zoo is what made Linux viable and it's just pure luck that IBM lost control over IBM PC zoo precisely when it was passing from “programs talk to hardware directly thus hardware compatibility is required” to “hardware is now powerful enough to afford real OS”.

DOS program were in wide use till XXI century and hardware manufacturers had to support compatibility all that time — and by the beginning of XXI century Linux was already established enough for server manufacturers to not ignore it (although they supported quite a zoo of different OSes back then, the important thing was that Linux was there already and no other free OSes were there, timing was critical for the viability of Linux).