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"immediately lost control of it because all its components except the BIOS were COTS" is also a good description of the Apple II, but Apple was able to mostly k
by jecel 4y ago
"immediately lost control of it because all its components except the BIOS were COTS" is also a good description of the Apple II, but Apple was able to mostly keep clones at bay in their key markets. I believe IBM could have as well, but didn't initially care enough (the PC was a small part of its business, but micros were 100% of Apple).
Note that they took out 7 patents on the PC AT (286). When their attempt to take back control via the PS/2 in 1987 failed, they spent the 1990s getting chipset makers and clone makers to license their patents. Had they tried this in the 1980s the industry might have gone in a different direction.
- tadfisher 4y agoI suspect the real answer is not commodity hardware, but commodity software. As in, it wasn't the PC that "won", it was MS-DOS on PC-compatible hardware. You can't clone a Mac without their ROMs, and a clean-room implementation would fall quickly behind without a sustained effort. But Microsoft can sell anyone the disks, and your clone can respond to the right interrupt calls, and IBM can't do a thing to stop either of you.