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 A

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.