You should go read Microsoft's attempt at excluding Linux/Unix from running on x86 using ACPI!

https://web.archive.org/web/20070202174648/http://www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03020.pdf

The 90's? Locked bootloaders would've meant people woukdve simply bought different machines without a locked bootloader.

See the IBM/Phoenix BIOS war - it's essentially the same thing. IBM didn't want to license their BIOS to everyone, so Phoenix reverse engineered it. If I remember right, IBM was trying to lock everyone to using their OS.

Valid question. You can ask this about many things:

Would the Internet as we know it exist if Facebook, AOL, and Yahoo had united to create a walled garden?

Would Macbooks as we know them today exist without an open source ecosystem? Would the company Appke exist? Would there be an iPhone?

Would the web exist without Linux? Both developed at the same time, 1991 till now, and most stuff runs on Linux servers.

Would the people who build all the hardware and software even be interested in computers had they not played with (build) computers in the 90ies? What if we had given them an iPad aith CandyCrush that just works; and not BIOS codes, cables, extension cards and drivers?

I think you're forgetting where Linux was the most successful by far: Servers and Android. Server guys do what they want, if you tell them they can only use software you allow them to, they will laugh at you and buy their data center elsewhere. Android has had locked bootloaders forever (I actually think even my very first phone had one).

So maybe development would have been harder? I mean, we don't have looked bootloaders on desktop even today, not really locked at least, so it's hard to tell. Linux's main audience would not have cared I think.

Things just weren't like that then. Otherwise all PC peripherals would be locked down too, so no device drivers. That was already a problem with cheap windows crap. But the better stuff was documented.

Maybe there would be no Linux but that isn't as bad as it sounds, since BSD Unix was being pried loose at the time, plus there were other kernels that had potential. And the consumer PCs we use now weren't really foreseen. We expected to run on workstation class hardware that was more serious (though more expensive) than PCs were at the time. They would have stayed less locked down.

Asded: PCs were an interesting target because there was a de facto open hardware standard, making the "PC compatible" industry possible. So again, without that, we would have used different hardware.

Seconding that's a not-how-things-were.

The lovely thing with legacy architectures (6502, 68k, x86, z80, etc.) that were in use during that time is that they were very very simple: all you needed to do was put executable code on a ROM at the correct memory address, and the system would boot it.

There wasn't anything required other than making sure the code was where the CPU would go looking for it, and then it'd handle it from there.

Sure, booting an OS meant that you needed whatever booted the CPU to then chain into the OS bootloader and provide all the things the OS was expecting (BIOS functions, etc.) but the actual bootstrap from 'off' to 'running code' was literally just an EPROM burner away.

It's a lot more complicated now, but users would, for the most part, not tolerate removing the ability to boot any OS they feel like, so there's enough pressure that locked shit won't migrate down to all consumer hardware.