Back then, everyone thought Windows NT had “won”, and it was game over for every other operating system.
Same thing here. Nvidia might look strong now but all it takes is an open source project that competes effectively to change everything.
For practical purposes it is. Bur it's not Windows NT that killed it, it's Linux.
The actually reality is POSIX flavoured OSes are most widely used operating systems in the world, for various levels of what means to be POSIX, and to what level they expose it.
"Transcending POSIX: The End of an Era?"
https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/transcending...
Additionly Darwin evolved from a mix of BSD and MACH.
NeXTSTEP drivers were written in Objective-C, and a C++ subset on Darwin.
In any case you won't be running CLI applications on iOS, rather applications that depend on a mix of Objective-C and nowadays also Swift, hardly UNIX.
Using BSD sockets on iOS doesn't support all the iOS networking capabilities, for example.
NeXT approach, later adopted by Apple, was similar to Windows NT POSIX in spirit.
The UNIX compatibility is there to help bring applications into the platform, and take place in US government contracts, not to make it easier to port applications elsewhere.
There are even some recordings from meetings at NeXT, with Steve Jobs discussing how NeXT should position itself on the workstation market.
Nvidia made their fortune riding 2 consecutive hype waves - crypto and LLMs.
That's a pretty reductive way of looking at things. Nvidia got to where they are today because they made the "different better AI model" by spending billions of dollars in AI research when other companies were fighting over scraps. They were the ones investing in a high-level GPGPU programming model when Apple and AMD were busy stabbing each other in the back over OpenCL. Just look at their list of papers and compare it to the contributions of your favorite FAANG member: https://research.nvidia.com/research-area/machine-learning-a...
Nvidia owns this market because Apple, AMD and Intel have a grudge match that is apparently more important than cross-platform harmony.
I attended one Khronos webminar where the panel was surprised that anyone would ask about Fortran support, and showed total lack of knowledge about PGI compilers.
Additionally with very crude tooling.
Everyone is out for blood in this market. Going after Khronos for not addressing Fortran FFI is a cart before the horse argument, from where I'm standing.