Basically the title
The 90’s? Locked bootloaders would’ve meant people woukdve simply bought different machines without a locked bootloader.
See the IBM/Phoenix BIOS war - it’s essentially the same thing. IBM didn’t want to license their BIOS to everyone, so Phoenix reverse engineered it. If I remember right, IBM was trying to lock everyone to using their OS.
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Made me think of the first season of Halt and Catch Fire.
Liked the first season but worry the second is crap so haven’t watched it.
I really enjoyed all 4 seasons.
It’s very character driven, which I know isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I enjoyed seeing characters grow and change through the seasons and loved the way the show moved through different eras of technology.
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?
On the “web without Linux”, I imagine it probably would have been scattered across a few proprietary Nixes until FreeBSD emerged from the AT&T lawsuit, upon which FreeBSD would have become the dominant web server.
What if we had given them an iPad aith CandyCrush that just works
We’ll know the answer in just a few more years here. Whole generation growing up that way currently.
Seconding that’s a not-how-things-were.
The lovely thing with legacy architectures (6502, 68k, x86, z80, etc.) that were in use during that time is that they were very very simple: all you needed to do was put executable code on a ROM at the correct memory address, and the system would boot it.
There wasn’t anything required other than making sure the code was where the CPU would go looking for it, and then it’d handle it from there.
Sure, booting an OS meant that you needed whatever booted the CPU to then chain into the OS bootloader and provide all the things the OS was expecting (BIOS functions, etc.) but the actual bootstrap from ‘off’ to ‘running code’ was literally just an EPROM burner away.
It’s a lot more complicated now, but users would, for the most part, not tolerate removing the ability to boot any OS they feel like, so there’s enough pressure that locked shit won’t migrate down to all consumer hardware.
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competition in the x86 OS space back then
Oh yeah: there were a stuuuupid amount of OSes.
On the DOS side you had MS, IBM, and Digital Research.
You also had a bunch of commercial UNIXes: NextStep, Solaris, Xenix/SCO, etc. along with Linux and a variety of BSDs. There were also a ton of Sys4/5 implementations that were single-vendor specific so they could sell their hardware (which was x86 and not something more exotic) that have vanished to time because that business model only worked for a couple of years, if that.
There was of course two different Windows (NT, 9x), OS/2 which of course could also run (some) Windows apps, and a whole host of oddballs like QNX and BeOS and Plan9 or even CP/M86.
It was a lot less of a stodgy Linux-or-Windows monoculture, and I miss it.
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…I still have some OS/2 (or, rather, ArcaOS) systems running here.
Mostly for a very limited subset of things that never really migrated across to “modern” windows - I have a BBS running on there because 16 bit DOS apps on OS/2 was pretty much the best way to run them when it was 1994, and in 2024 it’s still the best way to deal with them.
but users would, for the most part, not tolerate removing the ability to boot any OS they feel like, so there’s enough pressure that locked shit won’t migrate down to all consumer hardware.
what makes you think that?
The same reason people who drive 20 miles a day have worries about range on an EV that’ll do 300, or why people espouse the freedom of Android but then use the default Google apps.
People like the option of choice, even if they’re not necessarily ever going to engage in making a different one.
If there are two options for a computer, one is “will run everything” and the other is “will only run Windows” a good portion of people are still going to pick the first, even though very few of them will ever do anything else, simply because people really really like having the option of choice.
I don’t think they even know that there’s a possible choice. Common people don’t understand computers, not at this level.
Cars is a good example for another reason. Do we have new cars without a built-in internet connection and continuous user (and environment) tracking, and questionable remote control functions? Afaik we don’t.
