IBM built the original PC from off the shelf components and for some reason negotiated a non-exclusive license for MS-DOS with Microsoft. The only thing in the PC they held a copyright on was the BIOS ROM. A few companies tried making clones, IIRC Eagle Computer just brazenly dumped the IBM BIOS and used that and got sued out of existence. I believe it was Compaq that developed their own MS-DOS compatible BIOS from scratch that did not infringe so IBM had no case to sue. IBM got a competitor they didn’t want, and the PC became a 40 year platform.

The ’90s*

Made me think of the first season of Halt and Catch Fire.

its good to remember computers were used mostly by the computer people back then.

now with layman using theses devices en masse, things are a bit different. they dont need the nerds ro have a successful product anymore.

This! Manufacturers were trying to lock people into their systems, just by different means. Reverse engineering a piece of low-level software (BIOS) so that you could run high-level software written for that machine architecture on different hardware was the main battle of the day.