Definitely, but in the pre 1995 time frame for both MS/DOS and Unix derived workstation stuff, the default was for everything to be closed source and proprietary. Vendor lock in for high performance systems was much greater than the open hardware platforms and interoperable things we can piece together today.

If you had a time machine and gave some developers in 1991 the massive cpu, ram, storage and bus i/o throughput that we have today in a $1200 desktop PC, I don't doubt that they would have made those binary blobs a lot bigger and more complicated. Something about the typical software environment expanding to fill all available resources, seemingly as an inevitability.