4 ms·

You're both wrong. The IBM PC was made by IBM in 1981 and it was absolutely not open. (Just hurriedly implemented using commodity parts so, other than the BIOS

by blihp 10y ago

You're both wrong. The IBM PC was made by IBM in 1981 and it was absolutely not open. (Just hurriedly implemented using commodity parts so, other than the BIOS, it was pretty easy and legal to copy most of it) Then Compaq came along in 1982 and sold a clone of it... and in some ways it was even less open than the IBM. Neither one of those companies had any interest in the PC being 'open'. It was the 3rd party suppliers (i.e. BIOS by companies like Phoenix, Award, AMI along with motherboard manufacturers etc.) selling picks and shovels to the would-be prospectors (i.e. clone assemblers) that allowed for the 'open' PC standard. For example, there was a company call PCs Limited that licensed AMI BIOS so that they make some IBM clones... they did kind of OK and soon renamed themselves Dell...

pjmlp 10y ago
Would it have happened if Compaq hadn't done a clean room reverse engineering?
- blihp 10y ago
  I think so. Compaq just proved that it could be done without being bankrupted by an IBM lawsuit. IBM was the 800lb gorilla like Microsoft was in the 90's or Apple/Google are today. Being sued into oblivion was the real fear, not that it was technically a difficult job. Some of the other companies I mentioned were the ones that followed Compaq's lead and did their own clean room versions which they then sold to everyone else who came flooding into the market. As an aside, this was actually a problem for the first few years: take multiple independent clean room implementations, bake in some silly things that the manufacturers did with them (gotta customize, right?), and combine it with the bad programming practices of the day (i.e. programs written in assembly doing jumps into undocumented portions of the BIOS because, hey, it worked on the IBM and saved a few bytes/cycles or did something useful...) It was similar to how well web standards worked not too many years ago with multiple browser implementations doing/interpreting things slightly differently and developers doing things they shouldn't because they could... and that was with a public spec designed to be copied. Eventually things get worked out, but both had a rough start.

by blihp 10y ago

pjmlp 10y ago

Would it have happened if Compaq hadn't done a clean room reverse engineering?

blihp 10y ago
I think so. Compaq just proved that it could be done without being bankrupted by an IBM lawsuit. IBM was the 800lb gorilla like Microsoft was in the 90's or Apple/Google are today. Being sued into oblivion was the real fear, not that it was technically a difficult job. Some of the other companies I mentioned were the ones that followed Compaq's lead and did their own clean room versions which they then sold to everyone else who came flooding into the market. As an aside, this was actually a problem for the first few years: take multiple independent clean room implementations, bake in some silly things that the manufacturers did with them (gotta customize, right?), and combine it with the bad programming practices of the day (i.e. programs written in assembly doing jumps into undocumented portions of the BIOS because, hey, it worked on the IBM and saved a few bytes/cycles or did something useful...) It was similar to how well web standards worked not too many years ago with multiple browser implementations doing/interpreting things slightly differently and developers doing things they shouldn't because they could... and that was with a public spec designed to be copied. Eventually things get worked out, but both had a rough start.