In light of Apple’s recent 50th anniversary, I have been thinking about what the world would look like had the company never existed. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about Ridley Scott’s famous 1984 commercial. While absurdly melodramatic, the ad points to a future antithetical to the one both Steves at Apple were trying to create, one where everyone each has their own personal computer that empowers them to whatever they wanted. While the book 1984 specifically portrays a dystopian communist future, the 1984 ad doesn’t have anything to do with communism. It’s about IBM and the future that IBM represented. That’s not speculation. It’s how Steve Jobs framed the ad when presenting the famous commercial before introducing the Macintosh. His framing concludes with:

IBM wants it all, and is aiming its guns at its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?”

Despite being called the “IBM Personal Computer”, Jobs saw an IBM controlled future as one with computers that weren’t actually personal. That sounds ridiculous, but it doesn’t take much imagination even here in our Apple universe considering how the PC market actually developed during its formative years of the 1980s. In our universe, IBM never did come to dominate the personal computer industry because Microsoft did, and they did so almost exactly how IBM would.

Most people used DOS in the 80s not because they preferred it, but because the companies that employed them did. At first institutions chose PCs running DOS because they were the computers made by IBM, a serious company with “business machines” in its name and decades old relationships with fortune 500 companies. Not long after, however, most companies eschewed IBM for cheaper off-brand PC clones. Corporate purchasers didn’t buy COMPAQs, HPs, or Tandys because they thought they were better than IBMs, but because they were cheaper and ran the same operating system. Within a span of about five years Microsoft commoditized the PC market, which drove down prices and made DOS and Windows the de facto operating systems of increasingly off-brand computers that only a fraction of its users actually chose to use to begin with. When most people did willingly choose PCs in the 90s, it was because they were cheaper and because that’s what they or someone they knew had at work.

This isn’t to say that I think Microsoft represented the kind of threat Jobs warned about with IBM, rather to illustrate that the early PC market was defined by big businesses and other institutions who represented the vast majority of the market and who quickly consolidated on a single platform. On the contrary, Microsoft has always been very pro-personal computer. Also and most notably, no company screwed IBM better than Microsoft. That said, I think it’s fair to question whether Microsoft would have been able to pull one over IBM in a universe without Apple as they did in ours.

Given Commodore and Tandy also existed and released personal computers in the late 70s, let’s assume personal computers were inevitable and that they would sell enough to garner the attention of IBM. The question then becomes whether any of the other personal computer makers would pose the same threat to IBM as Apple did. If not, it’s easy to imagine a world where IBM doesn’t embrace off the shelf components or get hoodwinked by Microsoft for the sake of speed to market. Eventually big blue would still make something like the PC, which would still run something like DOS. The difference is that it would remain IBM controlled and sold at a price only institutions could justify. Eventually everyone would still use one of these computers, but they would be owned by the employer and only used for work or research, just like mainframes. Laptops would still happen because institutions would embrace their employees being able to take their microcomputer home and on the road for work. There would also without a doubt still be microprocessor-based consumer devices, but they would be more appliance-like. Think the entertainment systems shipped with cars, e-books, smart TVs, and video game consoles.

I’m also confident the internet was also inevitable, but would function entirely differently. Without personal computers, the internet would be defined by the needs of the various institutions who bought and controlled microcomputers and the makers of consumer appliances, sort of like how Amazon Kindles have free cellular connectivity, but only for buying e-books from Amazon. Speaking of cellular, mobile phones would also certainly happen, but there would be little reason for something like an iPhone or Android to exist in a world where computers are by definition work machines. We actually caught a brief glimpse of this. RIM dominated the mobile market because its Blackberry became the device of big business. While a few people did buy personal Blackberries, most bought whatever extremely limited consumer device promoted by their carrier at a given moment. Speaking of carriers, without the context of personal computing or a company like Apple, would anything have broken the carriers’ grip on the mobile phone market?

Could this darkest of timelines have actually happened had Apple not existed? I really think so, but I also think a more likely and less dark Apple-less outcome would still result in personal computers, just crappier and less tasteful ones. And while it’s certainly possible that a timeline without Apple wouldn’t be that much different than our own, I’m sure glad to live in one where Apple does exist and has been a driving force for keeping computers personal for 50 years.

Now let’s see if they can keep it up for 50 more.