Part 3 This is the third part of The Register FOSS disk roundup of some of the more memorable mistakes and could-have-beens from the beginning of the microcomputer industry to the present day.
Registers and RAM: Crash Course Computer Science #6
In Part 1 we looked at some of the bad decisions of the 8-bit era, and in Part 2 the more expensive mistakes of the 16-bit era.
The 32-bit era was a little different. With few notable exceptions, most contenders from previous eras fell under the PC stream. In the 1990s, the hitherto dull and businesslike Intel computers, which had been office equipment until then, about as exciting as a staple remover, caught up. They gradually got the nice graphics and multimedia features that were previously limited to proprietary systems.
Much of this was driven by the transition from DOS to Microsoft Windows. How it happened is itself one of the most disastrous business mistakes of all time. But other things happened first…
