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It was Intel and Microsoft that brought the microcomputing world out of the ebabel that existed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then it was a world where each manufacturer created their own operating system and even the ones that used the "standard" CP/M required a unique version for each system that you had to recompile for your unique hardware.
For those of you too young to remember there were (among those I remember): CP/M, CP/M-86, MCP/M, Tandy DOS, Apple ][ DOS, Apple 3, Apple Lisa,, Commodore (PET), Ohio Scientific, KIM, AIM, VIC, VIC-20, Commodore(VIC)-64, Amigia, ORIC, SuperBrain (no joke), Coleco Vision, Sinclair BOS, Atari, HP DOS, Acorn (Atom & BBC), Sony, Panasonic, Amstrad, and NeXT. And I have mosty likely left over 80% of those that existed unlisted. On top of these are the game systems that also did some computing functions and the dedicated word processors like the Wang, Exxon WP, and the Sinclair Spectrum.
The only real survivors were MS/PC-DOS and Windows along with the Apple Mac operating systems. Once the field had been narrowed to two it was possible to invest in developing applications without having to dedicate large resources to provide support to a great number of platforms.
Between the programming languages and operating systems, computing was a true tower of babel.
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