[KerrAvon]

This is seriously ahistorical revisionism. There was no universal networking standard in the 1980’s, and there certainly wasn’t anything universally suited for networking on microcomputers, especially not with the zero-configuration usability that Apple wanted. Remember that TCP/IP was largely a plaything for academics until the early 1990’s, and Apple had to create zero configuration and multicast DNS before they could consider deprecating AppleTalk for use on small LANs.

[stephc_int13]

I think that if Apple had been as powerful as they are now back then, they would have pushed "their" tech more aggressively and refused to support "inferior" protocols.

Really, we've been lucky that it was Microsoft and not Apple that was the dominant player in the 90s.

And I am far from a Microsoft fanboy, but I think that Apple hubris has always been there, and their contribution have to be mitigated in some way to stay on the positive side.

[pjmlp]

All vendors for home computers were vertically integrated, the PC was the exception only because IBM messed up and Compaq was able to get away with their reverse engineering of the PC BIOS, while the OS was developed by a third party (Microsoft).

Ironically what we see nowadays with phones, tablets and laptops is a return to those days of vertical integrated software.