Comment by musicale

> Very small hobby-entrepreneur computer makers were also losers; the new testing and certification requirements to show compliance with the standard posed a fixed cost on every computer model released, regardless of how many were sold, favoring economies of scale.

Although things turned out well for Apple (and for IBM, Commodore, and Radio Shack, for a while at least), it probably narrowed the playing field and made the industry less interesting.

CP/M probably suffered as well as a platform: although it could technically run (with appropriate hardware and software kits) on Apple, Commodore, Radio Shack and (for CP/M-86) IBM PCs, it was not the primary platform for any of them. DOS, generally MS-DOS, took its place on PC until it was replaced/obsoleted (including DR DOS etc.) by Microsoft Windows.