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The personal computer started appearing as early as the 1970's but they were all in split-up, proprietary formats. You had: S-100 bus hobbyist intel machines running CP/M, Tandy TRS-80 running Tandy's own O/S, Apple II running DOS (not realated to MS-DOS/PC-DOS), Commodore using BASIC or their own propreietary O/S....and all of them had their own file formats, disk storage formats, and stroage mediums that may or may not be at least a little compatible with each other. Then one major mainframe company came along and set the standards and left them open to be cloned!
Then in August 1981, IBM released their Personal Computer 5150, and the PC industry began. At first there was a trickling of Clones trying to get around the patented BIOS (Basic Input Output System), but this was eventually "clean room engineered" by three executives in a startup started in a Texas Pie Shop - Compaq! Meanwhile, Microsoft bluffed IBM they had a Operating System, undercut Digital REsearch in price on what was basically a quickly vibe-coded copy of DR's own software bought from a Seattle engineer, and then worded the legalease in their contract to allow them to have the ability to sell it to anyone who would entertain Bill Gates company business. This created an open architecture, closed-source system. As such, they almost eclipsed, and overtook Apple, who was the king before IBM's PC came along with the Apple II.
With the advent of clean-room engineered BIOS, many manufactures sprung up making IBM Compatible BIOS including Awared, Phoenix Technologies, and American MegaTrends to list the biggest brands in the business. These BIOS would turn up on less-as-expensive computer parts shipped in plain white boxes from over seas and assembled into often cheaper, faster, more efficient versions of the IBM PC. This bolstered competition and created a healthy lot of surviving in the industry including (but not limited to): AST, Acer, ASUS, Bondwell, Compaq, Dell/PC's Limited, Everex, IBM/Lenovo, Hewlett Packard, Packard Bell, Gateway 2000, E-Machines...and so on. This high level of competition and high number of companies gave every company a niche in the market.
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Handheld devices have been a dream in the eye of everyone since the sixties with The Jetsons and Star Trek. Handheld communicators, wrist-watchy things that were full blown computers, all exist now, but back then, it was a dream. The eighties made cheesy attempts at this using wristwatches, the ninteies brought us Personal DIgital Assistants (PDAs), and cellular phones, and handheld game systems to the masses. THe 2000's was when the handheld device came about. It started off still a mix of fragmented genres, ie a Flipphone, a MP3 Player with internet access, and the LAptop computer, but by 2010, they could all be combined into a device we call the Smartphone, and it's larger cousin, the tablet.
In the early 2000's, Apple introduced their killer hardware, the iPod, a mp3 player capable of connecting to the internet, syncing with your mp3 collection on your computer via iTunes, and capable of doing some other things (over time). Soon thereafter, others started making their own attempts to appease the market with more and less compatible solutions ranging from 2-bit garbage like the iLo, to decent midrange products like the Creative Zen, all the way to the upmarket Microsoft Zune (possibly the only Microsoft Product I ever believed in without any misgivings about it). Unlike the PC, ALL of these companies made their software, hardware, and so on, proprietary. About the only standard items were the headphones, even the chargers and connectors that connected to USB at one end had some special plug at the other end that didn't fit even others in the same product line!
This proprietary nature continued when we got into phones but like PC vs. Mac, split into three, now two genres: Android/Google, Apple i-device, and Microsoft WIndows Phone. Windows Phone died out early as it was just as clunky as everything else they'd ever done, but Android and Apple became the two remaning champions. The PC vs Mac of the smartphone world. Android was a standard, while Apple was a Walled Garden. But something was off about this compared to the PC vs. Mac of old...see, Android itself is also it's own walled garden. While the software was open enough, the hardware was closed to be used with anything else. With a PC, you could use alternate oerating systems like Linux, Unix, BSD, BeOS, OS/2, heck, even MacOS in some cases, but with a Apple, which you could also put LInux on their computers, their phones were off limits, including from a LEGAL standpoint.
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