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in reply to Timely_Jellyfish_2077

lemmy - Link to source

solrize

Things just weren't like that then. Otherwise all PC peripherals would be locked down too, so no device drivers. That was already a problem with cheap windows crap. But the better stuff was documented.

Maybe there would be no Linux but that isn't as bad as it sounds, since BSD Unix was being pried loose at the time, plus there were other kernels that had potential. And the consumer PCs we use now weren't really foreseen. We expected to run on workstation class hardware that was more serious (though more expensive) than PCs were at the time. They would have stayed less locked down.

Asded: PCs were an interesting target because there was a de facto open hardware standard, making the "PC compatible" industry possible. So again, without that, we would have used different hardware.

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to Timely_Jellyfish_2077

lemmy - Link to source

_edge

Valid question. You can ask this about many things:

Would the Internet as we know it exist if Facebook, AOL, and Yahoo had united to create a walled garden?

Would Macbooks as we know them today exist without an open source ecosystem? Would the company Appke exist? Would there be an iPhone?

Would the web exist without Linux? Both developed at the same time, 1991 till now, and most stuff runs on Linux servers.

Would the people who build all the hardware and software even be interested in computers had they not played with (build) computers in the 90ies? What if we had given them an iPad aith CandyCrush that just works; and not BIOS codes, cables, extension cards and drivers?

in reply to Timely_Jellyfish_2077

lemmy - Link to source

UnfortunateShort

I think you're forgetting where Linux was the most successful by far: Servers and Android. Server guys do what they want, if you tell them they can only use software you allow them to, they will laugh at you and buy their data center elsewhere. Android has had locked bootloaders forever (I actually think even my very first phone had one).

So maybe development would have been harder? I mean, we don't have looked bootloaders on desktop even today, not really locked at least, so it's hard to tell. Linux's main audience would not have cared I think.

This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to UnfortunateShort

lemmy - Link to source

BearOfaTime

Early Android (circa 2009) didn't have locked bootloaders.

Google wanted people to experiment, which was basically free research for them. Pixel's today are unlocked when purchased from Google.

Even my earliest Verizon phones weren't bootloader locked - they didn't start doing that for a few years (my last Verizon phone in 2012 wasn't bootloader locked). And Verizon is arguably the worst vendor when it comes to bootloader locked phones.

in reply to wildbus8979

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Nanook

 — (Shoreline, WA, USA)
@wildbus8979 Actually, because it used a Mach microkernel, it could easily be ported to ANY hardware, that is the whole entire point of Mach. Also it did run on the Mc680x0 family and that was what Mac was based upon at the time, prior to Power PC chips, prior to Intel, prior to M chips, and it is precisely that Mach microkernel that enabled the easy transition from one hardware platform to the next.
This entry was edited (6 months ago)
in reply to Mwa

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Nanook

@Mwa @wildbus8979 Yes, early on there was AT&T and Berkley, System-V became AT&T's mainstream though there were off-shoots like CB-Unix for PDP11/70's which only had 64k I+D space, and Berkeley had 4.2 and 4.3BSD, and now you have offshoots of those, such as FreeBSD and NETBSD, MacOS is a highly mutilated BSD sitting atop a Mach micro-kernel with the Mac finder sitting on top of the whole mess. The Mach microkernel provides a layer of hardware abstraction that makes it easy to jump between architectures as Mac has often done. What I do not like about MacOS is that they include only drivers necessary for their hardware and forbid the use on Non-Mac's by license. This limits your selection of things like video cards to those they specifically chose to use.

Linux reshared this.

in reply to BearOfaTime

lemmy - Link to source

Captain Aggravated

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.
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