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As much as I adore all the Jay Miner-led designs, in the grand scheme of things most of the advantages they posed come from being brilliant - and highly customized - relative to their time frame. The Sharp and NEC computers marketed in Japan offer an "alternate history" look at things but even they eventually succumbed to Wintel in the 90's.

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"Wintel" is not really a thing. Apple fans misunderstood that every other platform was the same as their vertically integrated walled-garden platform. The PC clone market was different from the Mac market in an important way which made it fundamentally inaccurate to think about Apple's competition as if it were coming from one monolithic entity. I was really hoping to stop hearing this silly, inaccurate term "Wintel" when Apple started using Intel processors (ages ago now).

I'm glad you brought up the Sharp! The X68000 definitely belongs in the same pantheon.

I will quibble that difference between the PC and the Jay Miner designs is much more than the brilliance of Jay Miner. The early PC design was probably hobbled intentionally by IBM to keep it from cannibalizing their low-end mainframes and workstations. I believe that was part of why Bill G parted ways with them on OS/2: crippled PCs may have had some value to IBM, but none whatsoever to Microsoft!

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