I think years later people are going to look back and say we had it pretty good with Windows/Linux/*BSD and x86.
I can take a bunch of OSes and run them on standard x86 hardware and peripherals more or less, build my own OS if I want to and run my own apps with the compilers, linkers and frameworks of my choice. Skip forward a few years and there's a good chance that will all be gone.
x86 is also a less than ideal proposition with Intel the only game in town - sure they are Open Source friendly for now but still it would've been a better world where the likes of AMD and VIA were flourishing in x86 land.
You're right. Growing up with PCs I took for granted the fact I could download any OS and install it easily. It's so incredibly different to the closed off world of tablets and phones, where getting any non-OEM code to run is a huge undertaking. A few years ago this seemed OK, because the phones and tablets were low powered utilities. Today they're rapidly becoming our PCs and so we're quickly moving towards a world in which our primary PCs are completely closed devices.
It's remarkable that I could easily dust off my 2002 era desktop and boot a modern Linux distro, but that trying to get my 2013 era tablet to boot anything other than the Android 4.4 that it shipped with would be a huge struggle. It's such a shame things are going this way.
It wasn't just x86, it was the fact that IBM released the entire documentation for the PC architecture up to the AT, including the BIOS source code (which was copyrighted, so competitors could not just copy it, but they could certainly study its function and produce a different but compatible implementation.)
For the PC, things started taking a turn for the worse with EFI and SecureBoot, but before that it was quite open.
Yes of course x86 implies the BIOS and the historically very significant reverse engineering of it by Compaq.
However EFI and Secure boot have not changed anything at all. UEFI is a standard and most vendors use the reference implementation from Intel and its all at least as good as BIOS in terms of being documented.
"I think years later people are going to look back and say we had it pretty good with Windows/Linux/*BSD and x86."
I don't agree. I grew up with Microsoft ruling the world. The biggest problem wasn't the dictatorship, is was the poor quality of the experience in the face of the dictatorship.
Apple has major flaws in its experience, but they're nowhere near as bad as the dog days of Windows 98.
What people don't get about Microsoft is however bad they were, they practically enabled a hugely diverse and mostly open hardware and software ecosystem and they had to standardize and open up in order to keep it going. Sure they had their monopolistic ways but fortunately they were reigned in for the better.
It's disingenuous to claim user experience requires a closed and non standard system. And besides that Microsoft and Linux distros have made steady progress towards improving the quality and experience while still keeping the PC ecosystem open.
I can take a bunch of OSes and run them on standard x86 hardware and peripherals more or less, build my own OS if I want to and run my own apps with the compilers, linkers and frameworks of my choice. Skip forward a few years and there's a good chance that will all be gone.
x86 is also a less than ideal proposition with Intel the only game in town - sure they are Open Source friendly for now but still it would've been a better world where the likes of AMD and VIA were flourishing in x86 land.