That was the most know computer running that software.

Commodore Basis == Microsoft Basic

Car manufacturers came to the same conclusion and tada there is Stellantis and 50% of all cars came from the same factory. Houses are pre-fab for decades. Humans love brands but many items come from the same factory just with another label.

That there are so many Linux distro's is why it's still a niche on desktops and it will always stay that way.

Microsoft and Google are the company with the highest number of contributions to the Open Source community, that is in volume.

The problem with the diversity is that, because they all know it better, there isn't any perfect distro. If they would work together and fix all the flaws that make people choose another distro it would be perfect and compatitive, now it's just not.

I have been using computers since the early 1980's, using Linux and Windows for over 30 years now.

Money is not the issue. Microsoft and Google are among the largest contributors in the OS community, most meaningfull packages have been bought, adopted by larger companies. The problem is the Linux community itself. How many distributions are there? Every piece of Linux software has to run on all these ditro's, that is impossible without compromises.

For corporate use OS is hardly usable, most companies want support contracts on everything they use and that is not possible.

It's funny that the US still has dial-up. In the Netherlands the last dial-up provider stopped their service on oktober 1st 2021, and that was already late.

Is anyone still using dial-up?

The Redlight district. Every city has/had them and for us it's just normal. As a kid I had to pass some of those windows to get to school.