Recently I talked to a 20 year old kid who didn't know that Apple existed before the iPhone...
Microsoft and Intel got big for one and only one reason:
IBM chose them as suppliers for the IBM PC. Had IBM used their own in-house chip or licensed CP/M as operating system computer history would have been different (the Kildall link is especially interesting, Microsoft got really lucky here):
For much of the 80s the Intel chips were inferior to other designs like the Motorola 68K. That is why the Macintosh, Atari (today only known for Pac-Man, but yes, Atari made computers rivaling Apple) and Commodore Amiga used more powerful Motorolas.
Random bit, there was a story Greg Allman used to tell on the radio that he was in a record shop when a young girl picked up a Beatles album and says to her friend, "Hey look, Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings!"
I do agree that IBM's choice of the 8088 for their original PC was one of Intel's greatest design wins, but at the same time it was the execution of both Microsoft and Intel in their focus on pursuing the business market which made it truly successful. The "hobbyist" microcomputer market in the late 70's and early 80's was scattered. With small wins all over the map.
Sadly, Motorola came out with the expensive part (16 bit bus 68k) late. Had they shipped the 8 bit bus version earlier, I think things would have looked a lot different. Had they followed up with the 68000 and 020 earlier, things would be a whole lot different.
Motorola did have an inexpensive next-gen 8/16-bit chip. It was called the mc6809. That said, the whole point of the 68000 was that it's 16-bits wide, so I'm not sure a cheaper, narrow bus version would have made any difference.
Isn't the CISC model contributing to better cache usage? As I understood, this was something that showed its strength in the time of raw computing-power rush and when cache started to matter.
Microsoft and Intel got big for one and only one reason: IBM chose them as suppliers for the IBM PC. Had IBM used their own in-house chip or licensed CP/M as operating system computer history would have been different (the Kildall link is especially interesting, Microsoft got really lucky here):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_801 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Kildall
For much of the 80s the Intel chips were inferior to other designs like the Motorola 68K. That is why the Macintosh, Atari (today only known for Pac-Man, but yes, Atari made computers rivaling Apple) and Commodore Amiga used more powerful Motorolas.
http://www.skepticfiles.org/cowtext/comput~1/486vs040.htm
But the "IBM-compatible" architecture won despite its inferiority through path dependency and the clones driving price down.