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Comment by Pet_Ant | Hacker News Reader

This is true and I don’t know why it’s downvoted. IBM was notoriously obsessed with lock-in, they just bungled it with the IBM PC because they needed to move fast because they didn’t want it to slip away from them. So, they used off the shelf components that anyone else could buy.

The lenient contract with Microsoft and the unexpected to them ruling on reverse engineering the BIOS sealed their fate.

But no company wants to compete in a commodity, they all want to be monopolies. All the Unix vendors tried to be common enough to be a selling point but idiosyncratic enough to lock in their clients.

Apple isn’t nefarious… they are the default.

Now, if we want to support their ambitions with our wallets is another question

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> Apple isn’t nefarious… they are the default

That's not true, well the second part is not true. it's not the default, it's a choice they made, there is no default.

They could have opted for maximum interoperability and openess.

Sk Hynix does not work with only sk hynix motherboards(I don't know if they even make motherboards), Intel cpus do not only work with Intel NICs. AMD GPUs do not only work with AMD CPUs. Nvidia GPUs do not require an imaginary Nvidia OS.

Hell windows is happy to work with whatever hardware you throw at it, but Macs nowadays have soldered ram and storage. And you can't install MacOS on any hardware you might like.

Getting files in or out of an iPhone without a Mac was a nightmare just a few years ago and I am confident it still is.

The default the GP is probably referencing is the early days all hardware vendors produced their own OS. Apple maintained the status quo as MS changed the status quo. The innovation MS really developed was the software license for OS's.

The first reversed engineered version of BIOS was released in 1982 by Columbia Data Products.

https://www.ntari.org/post/how-clean-room-reverse-engineerin...

Nefarious and default aren't incompatible properties. If companies (especially large, public ones) were benevolent by default, a lot of laws and institutions would not be needed anymore.

How should have IBM acted if they wanted to keep their lock-in?

They did try to keep the lock in, with the release of PS/2 and MCA architecture, which many think it relates only to keyboard and mice ports.

However it was too late to regain control and PS/2 alongside MCA was largely ignored.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PS/2

It's downvoted because it reads as though IBM made a mistake the commenter thinks they should've never made, as opposed to a mistake from IBMs perspective given their business strategy at the time.

That is, it appears to tacitly agree with, and chide IBM for failing to defended, closed, walled-garden ecosystems.

That's certainly not what it seems they meant. It's just how one might initially read it and downvote.

It was certainly a mistake to base the original IBM PC hardware design in easily obtained electronics, and hope the BIOS copyright would be enough to hold out clones, unlike previous IBM hardware.

But it's not their mistake at all there is nothing they could do, companies went out there and reversed engineered BIOS. They couldn't possibly stop them.

And yet Apple succesfully destroyed the grey box clone market in their space. Clearly it was indeed possible:

https://www.wired.com/1997/09/apple-kills-clone-market/

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