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

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!).