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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

You mean “IBM PC clone”. “Wintel” wasn't really a thing until Microsoft’s dominant consumer and business OSs were Windows, starting with Windows 95, by which point Linux had already done a lot of spreading.

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It's because MS-DOS and to a lesser extent Windows 3 was so bad at isolating you from the hardware that all the hardware had to be identical. If MS-DOS had been more like, say, CP/M then we would have had loads of weird machines from different manufacturers isolated from the software by proprietary BIOS[1] blobs. This would have made it harder to provide a useful Linux that worked across multiple machines.

[1] I mean "BIOS" in the CP/M sense of a layer that completely abstracted the hardware to the BDOS.

Q-DOS from which MS-DOS is derived is basically a clone of CP/M. I've written a CP/M bios for fun to bootstrap my IMSAI. It's not really that high level. You got even more from IBM's BIOS but of course that was too slow for what people wanted to do with those machines - so everyone talked to the hardware directly.

In those days it didn't matter what you were doing - the hardware was too slow. It's not like today where you can trade off performance for reliability or cleanliness. People praise Wozniak for his genius of trading hardware for software, but the tight coupling made it really hard to make future iterations. People didn't value upwards compatibility yet.

Windows 3.0 and especially 3.1 were where it took over from DOS in the business world.

Windows 3.x required DOS 3+, it didn't replace DOS. NT and, on the consumer side 95, replaced DOS as the base OS.

That's not really an important distinction. 3.x was the first mainstream Windows.

Win95 still booted from a modified DOS.

True, but that DOS and Win95 weren't separate products.

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