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Comment by CamperBob | Hacker News Reader

There's no way in hell every Tom, Dick, and Harry would have their own 3000 MHz computer if it weren't for that Wintel near-monopoly, though.

Wintel doesn't get the credit they deserve. Everybody running Linux on anything faster than an 80386 owes Bill and Andy lunch, at least.

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I'm not sure that's true, though it's a counterfactual so hard to prove either way. I think without Wintel, probably we would've had more competition and innovation in the area, and cheaper/faster machines. There was plenty of speeding up and broadening of home-computer access before Wintel came on the scene, with competition between Amiga, Atari, Apple, etc. And even in Wintel, innovation sped up noticeably once AMD managed to temporarily break Intel's stranglehold, and inject a bit of competition into the x86 market.

Keep in mind, it was Wintel that locked us into a single CPU platform. Otherwise we'd be on ARM by now.

Not so in China: http://lemote.kd85.com/

And indeed, looking forward: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ARM-Atom-Netbooks,7242.html

> I think without Wintel, probably we would've had more competition and innovation in the area, and cheaper/faster machines.

Maybe. Or maybe we'd just have locked on to CP/M-86 and Digital Research, which was just as tied to x86.

However, it's impossible to tell if someone like Gates would have risen to the top. Gary Kildall was not Bill Gates and, for that reason among others, Digital Research never became Microsoft. Corporate culture and philosophies matter.

Everybody you mentioned has already bought them lunch several times over, CamperBob. The problem is that they keep asking for more of our lunch money.

Innovators - really any business providing a product or service that's of some value - deserve to get paid. Competitors, however, deserve to be treated fairly, which Intel and Microsoft both have a track record of not doing. They have both done a lot of incredible work over the years but IMO their reputation is tarnished, and people like RMS, while they may at times sound crazy, have done a lot of good for businesses and hobbyists alike.

In an alternate world where Windows wasn't dominate, we probably wouldn't have been locked into x86, and you are right, we wouldn't have 3000 MHz machines, but we probably would have BETTER machines since x86 sucks so hard.

Even if hardware performance didn't improve as much as it has (and that's a really big if), it would have improved.

Software might not have eaten up all the performance profits, either, though. Overall, we might have had more clock cycles free and gotten things done more quickly with whatever hardware we had.

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