> Name a period where digital tech was not controlled by a cozy arrangement of one or two entities
Ok, lets talk about the 80s. I could do this for other decades.
Monopoly in Operating Systems? No clearly not, IBM had its own (more then 1), various Unix, VMS, CSM, various DOS, lots of costume proprietary stuff.
Monopoly in machine architecture? Clearly not, you had IBM mainframe and midrange, you had DEC Vax (and PDP11 still around). DEC had many competitors, most failed in the early 80s. But were replaced by Motorola based workstations and servers. HP was a big player in the 80s. You had Apple doing its own thing. PC based systems were on the rise, including being used as servers. You also still had a huge amount of 8-bit micros being sold as well. I don't see a monopoly.
Lets talk about processors fabs. Lots more companies had fabs back then. IBM, DEC, Intel, AMD, Toshiba, NEC, Motorola, National Semiconductor, HP and even Commodore had their own fabs and you had contract fabs like VLSI. Monopoly?
And there was so much more strange stuff happening in Britain, Germany and so on.
So please, actual tell me what monopoly you are talking about instead vaguely referencing abstract concepts!
> Take for example the story of RISC. The architecture is only now being "rediscovered" after being crushed for decades.
This is just complete nonsense. First of all the RISC/CISC division isn't as relevant today as it was then, and the idea that 'RISC' was lost is complete nonsense.
Sun/Oracle/Toshiba and co build new SPARC to this day, Tosbia mainframes have been running on SPARC this whole time. Lots of IBM stuff runs on POWER to this day as well. Even in the 2010s SGI MIPS based clusers were common. And during this whole time MIPS and RISC basically owned the embedded markets between them. So its really only on the PC and server PC where x86 was dominate. Turns out that's not all of computing.