When I worked at Digital Equipment, it did appear that IBM was going to be that company, but that there would clearly be others in the market. As things turned out, IBM got to name their heir apparent, but lost control as soon as the BIOS was reverse engineered and the clone market made Microsoft what it is today. Sun Microsystems' is the last great hope to keep the computer industry from reaching a stalemate. There is Coke and there is Pepsi. There are agreed-upon interfaces.
Competition is good.
CPU Wars started as a in-house comic strip posted on bulletin boards in Digital's famous Mill in Maynard, Massachusetts, starting in 1977. As its popularity with Digital's employees and its customers grew, CPU WARS turned into a full-fledged comic book that was finally published in 1980. CPU Wars has been referenced for years as part of computer history. In the book The Ultimate Entrepreneur , CPU WARS was described as an allegory of the real market struggle between IBM and Digital. Vintage versions of this comic book have been sold at auction to raise money for The Computer Museum and other organizations interested in preserving the history of US Computer technology.