... After the BIOS was reverse engineered
Um, no reverse engineering was necessary; I still have the full BIOS assembler listing printed in the Technical Reference Manual that I bought with mine.
This is a great example: were the important protocols and general structure patented, what you know of as the internet would not have been delayed or more expensive, it would have never existed.
I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate that it would have existed, in a different form.
Remember SNA? When TCP/IP was young, SNA was better. There is no reason the web couldn't run on SNA. But it would be a really different web; your ISP would (auto-)generate device configurations so you could connect. But it would still provide the same basic functionality to those with access to it.
TCP/IP prevailed over SNA because it was unencumbered and readily available, not on technical merit.* Ditto Ethernet over Token Ring. The web we have prevailed over all its stillborn competitors because it was unencumbered.
(* I make no judgement of technical merit, I merely point out that it was not the principal factor.)
I also have run my own "hobby" mail server for about a dozen years, and host a half-dozen domains that receive mail. My tool chain is Postfix/Dovecot/Amavis/ClamAV/SpamAssassin/Squrirrelmail on OpenBSD, and I also do my own DNS (with two secondaries in Europe).
Every couple of years, I need to do a technology refresh, but other than that the system runs itself. Yes, the power fails at my house, but the UPS under NUT lets it all come down gracefully and come back up unattended..
Thanks to the great care I took in setting it all up, this stuff is so reliable that I can afford to leave it alone for months at a stretch. It can be done.
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Seriously, go answer the questions, and see where the various parties agree/disagree with you. You may be surprised.
When has Microsoft ever forced someone to upgrade their browser?
This really happened, in about 1996.
I'm too lazy to recall the details, but my computer was unusable until I allowed the upgrade to complete. Multiple reboots, cancels, retries, etc.; I even pulled the power cord during the process at one point, to no avail. My work depended on using the currently installed version, so it mattered.
It was the thing that pushed me over the edge with Microsoft. I have recently eased off (I'm typing this on a Windows media center PC), but I STILL have a Microsoft-free server room.
(Actually, it's also Linux-free; go OpenBSD. And there's an AS/400 in there too.)
I want to log in and instantly know how much money I have, while still being able to drill down into individual accounts to access the transaction history.
CIBC offers this in Canada.
I want to be able to transfer money between my accounts quickly and easily, without fees or limits.
This too.
I want to be able to pay bills on line,
This too.
have checks cut and then mailed to me, I want to deposit checks by scanning them at home and I want to generate disposable credit card numbers for online purchases.
No luck on this stuff. The disposable credit card numbers would be nice.
A few years ago I ran a service business with a monthly fee.
I was able to generate a transaction file (in the service's operational software) to send to my credit union to debit this fee from my customers' accounts and credit mine, but the file had to be manually uploaded to the credit union's secure web site.
My billing was completely automated except for that one manual intervention. It would have been really nice to automate that step as well, via upload to an internet-accessible endpoint.
Only great masters of style can succeed in being obtuse. -- Oscar Wilde Most UNIX programmers are great masters of style. -- The Unnamed Usenetter
