Without MSFT, apple would have gone the way of bell bottoms and Osborne's.
BTW, It was Harvard, not MIT.
Talking to a Mac person is like trying to reason with a leftist. At its best, it's just no fun. Bill Gates is the archetypal Evil White Man, and everyone else is just another victim.
You are correct on that, it was Harvard. Even better - he wouldn’t have been working for IBM if they hadn’t built the IBM PC.
And no, I doubt Apple would have gone the way of the Osborne or the Timex-Sinclair. Long before Microsoft started to affect Apple, Apple had two *huge* killer apps; Visicalc and Pagemaker. Combined with the equipment Apple was producing, those alone would have ensured the company’s survival.
If there was no Microsoft, Apple would probably have done *better* than it has today.