> What the IBM PC provided was a standard on which competition was unleashed

Entirely accidental. What really started this was the reverse engineering of the BIOS. This allowed any company to enter the market with a PC-compatible computer. IBM tried, but clean-room proved to be an effective defense.

> Without it, we would have many weak walled gardens

Kind of. There were Apple II clones with varyingly clever schemes around copying the original ROMs, and it provided slots so many manufacturers could provide hardware for the machines. Microsoft was one of them, with a Z-80 card that allowed the II to run CP/M software. Atari had a serial bus that allowed external expansion - less popular than the II, but still allowed other manufacturers to expand it. And let's not forget the ubiquitous S-100 bus, with hundreds of different companies making hardware for. In 1983 you could assemble a computer around your choice of processor, graphics (or not), IO, mass-storage, and so on.

> incompatible with each other

Kind of. Prior to MS-DOS, CP/M was the de-facto 8-bit standard for business computers. It had a multi-user version called MP/M, and versions for processors other than the 8080/85 and Z-80. In the higher end, Unix-compatible small computers started to appear - the TRS-80 model II could get a 68000 board, for instance.

There was an industry standard before IBM PC, based on Z80 S100 and CP/M

Some of it did. They are still mediocre ;-)

I would assume every good one would know IBM mainframes still run the world. And POWER processors are the second coolest ones (second to the mainframe ones).

It's been said that when Microsoft started to grow - say, in the mid-80s, Bill Gates' biggest fear was that it would turn into IBM.

A lot of old mission-critical banking or commercial software systems have been running on those machines for decades. Before the AI age, it'd seem impossible to migrate those programs off. Now with the AI help, there might be a glimpse of hope.

System z machines come with special AI processor modules these days, so it's clear IBM wants a piece of that pie also.

I learned BASIC in 1985 on an Apple II, and 6502 machine language in 1987, while in high school. I was able to publish a 6502 machine language program on a national computer magazine that year. Back then we printed the hex code of the program on paper, along with some explanation, then mailed it to the magazine. The magazine stuff manually typed in those hex code on the computer, and if they thought it worked well, they'd just publish hex code of the program and the explanation. Interested readers would then just typed the hex code into their computer to try it out.

The publication validated that programming was something I liked and was good at, which became the main factor I chose computer major in college.

Great story, I am wondering if nowadays this kind of being hooked on in any kind of technology is possible. Kids have ipad style computers or smartphones which are not really hackable. There are things like Scratch, which provide kind of easy access to programming, but that's not the same thing (or maybe I am just old and miss the old times with Atari ST and IBM PC clone with 486DX processor).

Yeah. Thank you Mr. Pierson for lending me the TRS80 Basic manual, even though I wasn't enrolled in the class that used them...

For me it was the Commodore 64 from a few years later (1982, I think?) - that's what got me into computers. Back then, to me and my nerdy friends, the C64 felt sorta like a 'rebel computer'; we weren't doing Lotus 1-2-3 or anything practical at all. We were just tinkering, mostly war dialing and pirating games. The C64 was cheap enough that broke-ass kids like me could afford to do the same shit the Apple II and TRS-80s were doing.