One bit of IBM's vast standard described how software user interfaces should look and work - and largely by accident, that particular part caught on and took off. It didn't just guide the design of OS/2; it also influenced Windows, and DOS and DOS apps, and of pretty much all software that followed. So, for instance, the way almost every Linux desktop and GUI app works is guided by this now-forgotten doorstop of 1980s IBM documentation.
Although they have all blurred into a large and very confused whole now, 21st century software evolved out of two very different traditions. On one side, there are systems that evolved out of Unix, a multiuser OS designed for minicomputers: expensive machines, shared by a team or department, and used only via dumb text-only terminals on slow serial connections.
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