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

You could run multiple OSes on the Amiga. Multiple ones were available, and you could write your own if you wished. Nothing would have stopped Linus hacking on any of those other machines. i386 just was the most available then. If it hadn't been an i386 PC it'd have been something else.

I mean, "Well, maybe community-made OS made specifically for this one, specific, device. If you are lucky." - you're describing Linux.

The luck here was Linus and the other hackers he attracted around Linux.

The i386 PC is an unimportant detail. *MANY* companies were racing to build affordable, commodity, capable, 32bit, MMU with paging, machines and get them out into the hands of the mass market. It was inevitable one or more of the *MANY* companies who _had long_ seen this opportunity and were _rushing_ to fulfil it would in fact _do what they were already trying to do_.