The Nerd in the High Castle

I like to read history books, and that includes the history of the computer industry. Steven Levy's stuff is pretty good, even if sometimes he gets a little breathless in the telling. Dealers of Lightning, West of Eden, Soul of a New Machine, stuff like that.

From reading enough of these, and from the tech press as well, I know there's this notion floating around that during the early 80s Apple was fighting the wrong enemy. (Pirates of Silicon Valley also plays this note.) During that era, Apple focused on IBM instead of on Microsoft. But Microsoft and MS-DOS really won their independence from IBM during the Clone Wars. Everyone wanted to clone the IBM PC, and run MS-DOS on it, because IBM had been so successful. If Apple had somehow won market dominance over IBM in the early 80s, they would have also defeated Microsoft by proxy.

That got me thinking though, that Microsoft probably would not have stayed out of the OS market. They were still a successful applications company at the time and, if PC-DOS had failed, they surely would have made another attempt at an OS product. Now it starts to sound like the plot of a alternate history novel, doesn't it? On the back cover: "What if Apple had defeated IBM in 1984? What if Microsoft had partnered with Commodore to sell MS-Windows in 1986?"

Wow I just realized... if someone wrote that book, I would totally read it.