How Operating Systems Became Consumer Goods
Personal computing created a strange new kind of product. A computer is a machine you can hold, but an operating system is only code, a set of instructions that tells the machine what to do. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak began by selling the machines themselves, while Bill Gates and Paul Allen built their empire around selling the invisible layer that made those machines useful.
That shift changed the economy of technology. Software, once seen as too technical and too abstract for ordinary people, became something packaged, advertised, and sold worldwide. Vast fortunes grew out of code, and ordinary buyers began to form loyalties to operating systems the way people once attached themselves to car brands or appliances.
These systems moved from specialist tools into daily life. They became part of work, communication, entertainment, and identity. People no longer dealt only with hardware. They lived inside software environments that shaped how they thought about information and even about themselves.
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